Database Reference
In-Depth Information
at familiar retailers or suppliers, and not only digital video content, but also the required move
to digital television and the explosive growth of email, messaging, mobile phones, RFID, Voice
Over IP (VoIP) usage, and more. We now have Blu-ray players that stream movies and music.
As we begin departing from physical consumer media storage, the companies that provide that
content—and the third-party value-add businesses built around them—will require very scalable
data solutions. Consider too that as a typical business application developer or database admin-
istrator, we may be used to thinking of relational databases as the center of our universe. You
might then be surprised to learn that within corporations, around 80% of data is unstructured.
Or perhaps you think the kind of scale afforded by NoSQL solutions such as Cassandra don't
apply to you. And maybe they don't. It's very possible that you simply don't have a problem that
Cassandra can help you with. But I'm not asking you to envision your database and its data as
they exist today and figure out ways to migrate to Cassandra. That would be a very difficult ex-
ercise, with a payoff that might be hard to see. It's almost analytic that the database you have
today is exactly the right one for your application of today. But if you could incorporate a wider
array of rich data sets to help improve your applications, what kinds of qualities would you then
be looking for in a database? The question becomes what kind of application would you want to
have if durability, elastic scalability, vast storage, and blazing-fast writes weren't a problem?
In a world now working at web scale and looking to the future, Apache Cassandra might be one
part of the answer.
The Cassandra Elevator Pitch
Hollywood screenwriters and software startups are often advised to have their “elevator pitch”
ready. This is a summary of exactly what their product is all about—concise, clear, and brief
enough to deliver in just a minute or two, in the lucky event that they find themselves sharing an
elevator with an executive or agent or investor who might consider funding their project. Cas-
sandra has a compelling story, so let's boil it down to an elevator pitch that you can present to
your manager or colleagues should the occasion arise.
Cassandra in 50 Words or Less
“Apache Cassandra is an open source, distributed, decentralized, elastically scalable, highly
available, fault-tolerant, tuneably consistent, column-oriented database that bases its distribution
design on Amazon's Dynamo and its data model on Google's Bigtable. Created at Facebook, it
is now used at some of the most popular sites on the Web.” That's exactly 50 words.
Of course, if you were to recite that to your boss in the elevator, you'd probably get a blank look
in return. So let's break down the key points in the following sections.
