As an author, I have some reservations about discussing performance tuning for Apache Cassandra. Too often, application development teams will complain to their Cassandra DBA (database administrator) that their cluster is performing too slowly. The mere existence of a chapter entitled Performance Tuning in a Cassandra book implies that there must be some hidden gems of knowledge within these pages that will give a DBA the power to wave their magic wand and instantly cure slow queries. This could not be further from the truth.
In Chapter 3, Effective CQL we covered how to write good CQL, which relies on designing well-thought-out Cassandra data models. To be completely clear, building tables with primary keys designed to (both) distribute well and serve specific queries is the best way to achieve high performance with distributed databases, and that includes...