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, we've explored data access patterns for compound primary key tables, and used our new knowledge to expose a paginated view of a user's most recent status updates. We discussed how to query range slices of clustering column values, and how to reverse the clustering order at both table creation time and query time. We reinforced our understanding of the CQL SELECT queries by performing the intricate task of paginating over all the rows in our status updates table, and then applied our new compound primary key toolkit to a totally different problem, the autocompletion of hashtags.

In Chapter 5, Establishing Relationships, we will apply our techniques for compound primary key data modeling to the task of describing relationships that do not have the clear parent-child structure of users and status updates. We'll also go beyond primary key-based data access, exploring the use of secondary indexes to look up data using any column we wish.