We have made a start with Cassandra. You can set up your local machine, play with cassandra-cli (see Chapter 9, Introduction to CQL 3 and Cassandra 1.2 for cqlsh), and write a simple program that uses Cassandra on the backend. It seems like we are all done. But, it's not so. Cassandra is not all about ease in modeling or being simple to code around with (unlike RDBMS). It is all about speed, availability, and reliability. The only thing that matters in a production setup is how quickly and reliably your application can serve a fickle-minded user. It does not matter if you have an elegant database architecture with the third normal form, or if you use a functional programming language and follow the Don't Repeat Yourself (DRY) principle religiously. Cassandra and many other modern databases, especially in the NoSQL space, are there to provide you with speed. Cassandra stands out in the herd with its blazing fast-write performance and steady linear scalability (this means if you double the node, you double the speed of execution).
The rest of the book is aimed at giving you a solid understanding of the various aspects of Cassandra—one chapter at a time.
You will learn the internals of Cassandra and the general programming pattern for Cassandra.
Setting up a cluster and tweaking to get the maximum out of Cassandra for your use case is also discussed.
Infrastructure maintenance—nodes going down, scaling up and down, backing the data up, keeping vigil monitoring, and getting notified about an interesting event on your Cassandra setup will be covered.
Cassandra is easy to use with the Apache Hadoop and Apache Pig tools, as we will see simple examples of this.
Finally, Cassandra 1.2 and CQL3 are some of the most revolutionary things that happened to Cassandra recently. There is a chapter dedicated to Cassandra 1.2 and CQL3, which gives you enough to get going with the new changes.
The best thing about these chapters is that there is no prerequisite. Most of these are started from the basics to get you familiar with the concept and then taken to an advanced level. So, if you have never used Hadoop, do not worry. You can still get a simple setup up and running with Cassandra.