Learning Apache Cassandra: Manage Fault Tolerant and Scalable Real-Time Data

by Mat Brown

Key Features
Learn how to install and use Cassandra from the ground up
Design rich schemas that capture the relationships between different data types using compound primary keys
Master the advanced features available in Cassandra 2.0 through a step-by-step tutorial that builds a real-world application's database layer.
Book Description
Cassandra is a distributed database that stands out for its robust feature set and intuitive interface, while still providing the high availability and scalability of a distributed store.

Starting from installing Cassandra and creating your first keyspace, to mastering the different table structures Cassandra offers and exploring the latest and most powerful features of the Cassandra Query Language, CQL3, this book explores each topic through the lens of a real-world example application. With plenty of examples, tips, and clear explanations, you'll master compound primary keys, collection columns, lightweight transactions, and many other advanced aspects of Cassandra.

By the end of the book, you'll be fully equipped to build powerful, scalable Cassandra database layers for your applications.

What you will learn
Install Cassandra and create your first keyspace
Choose the right table structure for the task at hand in a variety of scenarios
Use range slice queries for efficient data access
Effortlessly handle concurrent updates with collection columns
Ensure data integrity with lightweight transactions and logged batches
Understand eventual consistency and use the right consistency level for your situation
Implement best practices for data modeling and access
About the Author
Mat Brown is a professional software engineer in Brooklyn, New York. In his career, he has focused on building consumer-facing web and mobile applications for several companies; he currently works at Genius.

Table of Contents
Getting up and Running with Cassandra
The First Table
Organizing Related Data
Beyond Key-value Lookup
Establishing Relationships
Denormalizing Data for Maximum Performance
Expanding Your Data Model
Collections, Tuples, and User-defined Types
Aggregating Time-series Data
How Cassandra Distributes Data

Genres: Technology

248 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 19, 2015

Reviews

[Daniel · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the past, my experience with books published by Packt has been very negative. The more I was positively surprised by this book, which is an excellent, well-written and, at the time I am writing this, more or less up-to-date guide to Cassandra – perfect to refresh my outdated knowledge, but certainly even better for people entirely new to it. This book is targeted at application developers, explaining the dos and don'ts of schema design, and it's mostly very hands-on, with an ongoing example application whose CQL queries can be tried out by the reader in cqlsh, the CQL shell. If you actually want to learn how to run a Cassandra cluster in production, this is not the right book.

[Jevgenij · Rating 5 out of 5]

What an excellent book! Exactly what I was looking for! It gives both theoretical introduction and practical advice regarding application design and performance consideration. Not for advanced users, but a perfect starting point.

[Jascha · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sooner or later, every professional working with noSQL databases will meet a beauty called Cassandra, a distributed database management system initially developed by Facebook and now a top-level project at the Apache Foundation. Widely acclaimed for its features, Cassandra is a beast difficult to tame. Next to tech giants such as Facebook, Twitter and Ubisoft are a myriad of start-ups selling data driven products relying on Cassandra. The high demand of professionals able to properly set it up and tune it results in a lot of documentation available, plus a very active community ready to improve it and support new comers. Among the many titles available to us at the bookstore is Learning Apache Cassandra by Mat Brown, released early this 2015, a title that covers the latest features and targets beginners, be them professionals or simply curious people interested in a quick taste of what Cassandra is and what is it capable of.

Spanning through less than 300 pages, Learning Cassandra is short but very intense book. By the time the reader gets to the back cover, he will feel like he has been exposed to a lot of information and, mainly, that he was gradually been taken, step by step, through the very basics of this technology, without any abrut change of topic, without feeling lost. The book written by Mat is easy to follow and comprehensive. Through a learn by doing approach, he does introduce each and every concepts, starting with an overview of what Cassandra is and how it differs from other solutions, up to topics such as lightweight transactions and collections, passing through the different data types. The different topics are presented to the reader through a unique example, an application that closely resembles some basic feature of Facebook. The examples are explained step by step. Nothing is taken for granted.

A couple of things deserve a praise: the first, is the choice of the author to present Cassandra through CQL, rather than through the bindings of a specific programming language, which would make it less useful and interesting to most of us; the second is the many concepts presented first in SQL, then in Cassandra. Mat here beautifully shows the differences between a noSQL database and an old school relational database. The author often highlights the importance of denormalizing the data and to state the questions we want to answer first and then build our queries around them.

Being a book for beginners, we must say that this title does not present any real world example. Similarly, Mat does use a test cluster made of a single machine, which is far from what we find in production. This rules out all the worries about replication, consensus and so on.

Overall, this is by far the most friendly introduction to Cassandra that I have read so far. While it does not provide anything related to administration and configuration, as well as nothing about real world scenarios, it is a perfect companion to anyone interested in learning what Cassandra is and how to get it to work.

As usual, you can find more reviews on my personal blog: http://books.lostinmalloc.com. Feel free to pass by and share your thoughts!

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is an excellent introduction to the No SQL database, Cassandra. It is targeted at those new to the database and at the needs of application developer, over that of an administrator. It primarily focused on how to model data to optimize queries, comparing and contrasting this to how one might approach a similar problem in an RDBMS.

[Peter · Rating 5 out of 5]

Blessedly concise tour of Cassandra syntax, distribution handling algortihms and a brief introduction into the underlying datastructures for the curious.