By Dhanya Arumughom —

Learning Apache Cassandra

Apache Cassandra is a high performance distributed database designed to handle large amounts of data across many commodity servers. Cassandra was first developed at Facebook to power the Facebook inbox search feature. Later, Facebook released Cassandra as an open source project on Google code which later became an apache incubator project and now it has become a top level apache project.

Cassandra can be used for manifold applications. There are a number of areas where Cassandra is the preferred database and excels other options. Some of them are Internet of things (IoT) applications, product catalogs and retail apps, user activity tracking and monitoring, messaging, social media analytics and recommendation engines. Cassandra has number of features and benefits that make it stand out among other databases and is preferred by many organizations for data management. Its linear scalability and proven fault tolerance makes it perfect for large, mission-critical data sets.

Cassandra Features and Benefits

  • Cassandra has a scalable architecture. It can supports thousands of servers and store several petabytes of data.
  • Cassandra is decentralized. It has a master less design where all nodes play similar roles. There is no concept of master or slave which provides operational simplicity without any network bottlenecks.
  • In Cassandra, data may be written to and read from any node since it has a master less architecture.
    Cassandra has a flexible and dynamic data model. It supports various modern data types and performs blazingly fast writes and reads.
  • Cassandra has the ability to add nodes without going down and produces predictable increases in performance.Read and write throughput both increase linearly as new machines are added, with no downtime or interruption to applications.
  • Cassandra is Durable. It replicates data on different nodes, which eliminate single points of failure and provide constant uptime.Failed nodes can easily be replaced with no downtime. This makes Cassandra a database with high availability.
  • In Cassandra, data is protected with a commit log design that ensures there is no data loss. The built in security with backup and restore keeps data safe.
    Cassandra allows replication of data across data centers in multiple geographies. It also offers multi-cloud availability zone support for writes/reads.
    Cassandra uses an SQL-like language which is very easy.

How to Learn Cassandra?

Prerequisites for learning Cassandra are:

  • The basics of SQL and traditional relational databases
  • The basics of programming in Java in order to use the Cassandra Java library
  • Knowledge of basic LINUX/ UNIX commands will be an added advantage.

Best Tutorials for Cassandra

We have collected a list of some of the best beginner level tutorials on Cassandra.

One of our favorite tutorials to best understand Cassandra's WHERE clause which is the most important thing to learn and understand when coming from SQL world is this.

Best Courses For Cassandra

However, if you already decided to take a deep dive, here are some of the best courses we found on Cassandra.

For Beginner Level
For Advanced Level

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