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)

Summary


In this chapter, you're off to a running start with your MyStatus application, having created our first table, inserted data into it, and learned a few ways to retrieve that data. We developed a model for how Cassandra tables are structured and took a deep dive into Cassandra's type system.

We now have experience with the INSERT and SELECT statements, two of the core operations in CQL. You learned that primary keys, at least the ones we've seen so far, determine the order in which rows are returned, but that ordering is opaque to an application. We can only rely on it being consistent. We saw some of the limitations of simple tables in Cassandra, and we know that the types of multirow retrieval we know so far aren't the most efficient.In Chapter 3, Organizing Related Data, we'll introduce a new way to structure a table that lets us overcome many of the limitations we encountered here.