Book Image

Learning Apache Cassandra - Second Edition

Book Image

Learning Apache Cassandra - Second Edition

Overview of this book

Cassandra is a distributed database that stands out thanks to its robust feature set and intuitive interface, while providing high availability and scalability of a distributed data store. This book will introduce you to the rich feature set offered by Cassandra, and empower you to create and manage a highly scalable, performant and fault-tolerant database layer. The book starts by explaining the new features implemented in Cassandra 3.x and get you set up with Cassandra. Then you’ll walk through data modeling in Cassandra and the rich feature set available to design a flexible schema. Next you’ll learn to create tables with composite partition keys, collections and user-defined types and get to know different methods to avoid denormalization of data. You will then proceed to create user-defined functions and aggregates in Cassandra. Then, you will set up a multi node cluster and see how the dynamics of Cassandra change with it. Finally, you will implement some application-level optimizations using a Java client. By the end of this book, you'll be fully equipped to build powerful, scalable Cassandra database layers for your applications.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)

Table configuration options


So far, we have looked at a few configuration options, especially to enable certain functionalities in Cassandra or configure Cassandra as you would in a production cluster. We have looked at keyspace replication options, such as replication strategy and replication factor. Similarly, you can set certain configuration parameters for a table as well. Let's look at the schema of our table users:

Here, you will notice a bunch of configurations being mentioned after the WITH keyword. Even though we didn't mention them when creating the table, Cassandra automatically sets the default values. Let's take a look at some of these options:

  • Caching: Cassandra provides two caching mechanisms to store data that is read frequently in memory so it can be fetched faster during later requests. Key cache is used to store partition keys and their locations on disk in memory. Row cache is used to store entire partitions in memory along with the actual rows.
  • Compaction: Compaction is...