Have you met Cassandra?

She’s a member of the non-relational database family and is powering some of today’s most data intensive applications. Her interests include:

• Horizontal scaling well beyond the capabilities of Relational Database Management Systems (RDBMS)
• Transparently distributing data
• Eschewing single points of failure
• Eliminating onerous database administration

These aren’t just tall tales she’s spinning. Groups like Netflix have shown her linear read/write scalability capable of handling the truly “big data” tasks. On top of that, Cassandra’s masterless peer to peer architecture enables Netflix to deploy a cluster anywhere in the world in 10 minutes or less, while simultaneously providing automatic data replication and fault tolerance.

Apache Cassandra (C*) provides these benefits by making some sacrifices – many of the niceties of SQL are missing. Aggregate functions, foreign keys, and consistent transactions are nowhere to be found. Updates spanning multiple related tables must be manually performed by the application, and queries may occasionally return outdated values. Fortunately, some experts in the field argue that up to 95% of applications do not need consistent transactions.

So, if your application processes serious data loads, falls in the 95%, and can live without aggregates, C* could be a great choice for you! BTI360 is here to help you get started with our Meet Cassandra series. Over the next few weeks, we’ll get hands on with the capabilities Cassandra has to offer. Click here to Get to Know Cassandra a little better!