Book Image

Mastering Apache Cassandra

By : Nishant Neeraj
Book Image

Mastering Apache Cassandra

By: Nishant Neeraj

Overview of this book

<p>Apache Cassandra is the perfect choice for building fault tolerant and scalable databases. Implementing Cassandra will enable you to take advantage of its features which include replication of data across multiple datacenters with lower latency rates. This book details these features that will guide you towards mastering the art of building high performing databases without compromising on performance.</p> <p>Mastering Apache Cassandra aims to give enough knowledge to enable you to program pragmatically and help you understand the limitations of Cassandra. You will also learn how to deploy a production setup and monitor it, understand what happens under the hood, and how to optimize and integrate it with other software.</p> <p>Mastering Apache Cassandra begins with a discussion on understanding Cassandra’s philosophy and design decisions while helping you understand how you can implement it to resolve business issues and run complex applications simultaneously.</p> <p>You will also get to know about how various components of Cassandra work with each other to give a robust distributed system. The different mechanisms that it provides to solve old problems in new ways are not as twisted as they seem; Cassandra is all about simplicity. Learn how to set up a cluster that can face a tornado of data reads and writes without wincing.</p> <p>If you are a beginner, you can use the examples to help you play around with Cassandra and test the water. If you are at an intermediate level, you may prefer to use this guide to help you dive into the architecture. To a DevOp, this book will help you manage and optimize your infrastructure. To a CTO, this book will help you unleash the power of Cassandra and discover the resources that it requires.</p>
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Mastering Apache Cassandra
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgments
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Problems in the RDBMS world


RDBMS is a great approach. It keeps data consistent, is good for OLTP (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_transaction_processing), provides access to good grammar, and manipulates data supported by all the popular programming languages. It was tremendously successful for the last 40 years (the relational data model in its first avatar: Codd, E.F. (1970), A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks). However, in the early 2000s, big companies, such as Google (BigTable, http://research.google.com/archive/bigtable.html) and Amazon that have gigantic load on their databases to serve, started to feel bottlenecked with RDBMS.

If you ever used an RDBMS for a non-trivial web application, you must have faced problems, such as slow queries due to complex joins, expensive vertical scaling, and problems in horizontal scaling. Due to these problems, indexing takes a long time. At some point you choose to replicate the data, there is still some locking, and this...