Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Summary
By now, you should be familiar with all the nuts and bolts of Cassandra. We have discussed
how the pressure to make data stores to web scale inspired a rather not-so-common data-
base mechanism to become mainstream, and how the CAP theorem governs the behavior of
such databases. We have seen that Cassandra shines out among its peers. Then, we dipped
our toes into the big picture of Cassandra read and write mechanisms. This left us with lots
of fancy terms. Furthermore, we looked into the definition of these words, the components
that drive Cassandra, and their influence on its behavior.
It is understandable that it may be a lot to take in for someone new to NoSQL systems. It is
okay if you do not have complete clarity at this point. As you start working with Cassandra,
tweaking it, experimenting with it, and going through the Cassandra mailing list discus-
sions or talks, you will start to come across stuff that you have read in this chapter and it
will start to make sense, and perhaps you may want to come back and refer to this chapter
to improve your clarity.
It is not required that you understand this chapter fully to be able to write queries, set up
clusters, maintain clusters, or do anything else related to Cassandra. A general sense of this
chapter will take you far enough to work extremely well with Cassandra-based projects.
How does this knowledge help us in building an application? Isn't it just about learning
Thrift or CQL API and getting going? You might be wondering why you need to know
about the compaction and storage mechanism, when all you need to do is to deliver an ap-
plication that has a fast backend. It may not be obvious at this point why you are learning
this, but as we move ahead with developing an application, we will come to realize that
knowledge about underlying storage mechanism helps. In later chapters, when we will
learn about deploying a cluster, performance tuning, maintenance, and integrating with oth-
er tools such as Apache Hadoop, you may find this chapter useful. At this point, we are
ready to learn some of the commonly used cases, and how they utilize various features of
Cassandra.
