As an application developer, you have almost certainly worked with databases extensively. You must have built products using relational databases like MySQL and PostgreSQL, and perhaps experimented with a document store like MongoDB or a key-value database like Redis. While each of these tools has its strengths, you will now consider whether a distributed database like Cassandra might be the best choice for the task at hand.

In this chapter, we'll talk about the major reasons to choose Cassandra from among the many database options available to you. Having established that Cassandra is a great choice, we'll go through the nuts and bolts of getting a local Cassandra installation up and running. By the end of this chapter, you'll know: