Cassandra Administration

In this course of introduction to NoSQL - Cassandra Administration you will be learning about introduction to architecture, knowledge about deployment, concept of replication and sharding, also you will be learning performance monitoring strategies etc. concepts you will be learning through this course.

223

 2h 22m | 13 Videos | 84443 Views |   Intermediate

Cassandra Administration Introduction

Cassandra is a distributed database from Apache which is highly scalable and is designed in such a way to manage very huge amount of structured as well as unstructured data. Cassandra is used today by modern businesses when they need a NoSQL database to deal with database at a massive scale and render a high performance.  It provides a powerful dynamic schema data model that allows maximum flexibility. Cassandra has become the solution to handle big data applications in every industry that is exploding. The massive scale, high performance and no failure point of the Cassandra has replaced the legacy of traditional relational databases (RDBMSs).  Cassandra has become the first choice for the IT professionals who are creating modern big data applications. Getting started with Cassandra is very simple and easy.

Cassandra Administration tool – NodeTool

Cassandra operates in the form of a cluster. These clusters are made up of nodes which are connected together. There is no single Master node in the Cassandra architecture. The NodeTool is an important administrative tool which helps the users to perform various administrative tasks on a Cassandra node. There are also few common operations used in the NodeTool to run Cassandra. The NodeTool also provides a quick command which helps to perform repair quickly and easily.

Important Features of Cassandra

Below mentioned are the important features of Cassandra

• Scalability – It is highly scalable and it allows the users to add more hardware and data if needed
• Availability – Cassandra has no single point of failure and it is continuously available for business
• Fast Linear Scale Performance – It maintains a quick response time
• Flexibility – Cassandra deals with all types of data like structured, semi structured and unstructured. It can accommodate itself to the data structures accordingly
• Easy data distribution – It helps to replicate data across various data centers
• Transaction support – Cassandra supports Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation and Durability (ACID )
• Cassandra is fault tolerant
• It contains a more powerful column family data model and is column oriented database.

Course Objectives

After successful completion of the Cassandra Administration course you will be able to

• Get in depth knowledge about Cassandra Concepts
• Understand the difference between Relational databases and Cassandra
• Learn the key features and benefits of Cassandra
• Understand the architecture of Cassandra
• Learn about the deployment in Cassandra

Pre Requisites for taking this course

A candidate who is taking this course should have a minimum exposure to Java and database or data warehouse concepts. He/She should also be familiar with Linux Command Line basics. Some basic knowledge of SQL statements will also be an added advantage.

Target Audience for this course

This course is targeted towards the following people

• IT professionals dealing with large volumes of data
• Working professionals looking for a career development in NoSQL and Cassandra
• IT developers and database developers who want to get placed in a better organization
• Graduates who are working on database management projects
• Students, researchers or anyone who is interested in knowing about NoSQL and Cassandra

Cassandra Administration Course Description

Section 1: Introduction to NoSQL – Cassandra Administration

Introduction to Architecture

The architecture of Cassandra is an important reason for its ability to scale, perform and continuous availability. The architecture of Cassandra was built on the assumptions that the hardware and system failures do occur. This makes the Cassandra work in a unique way of managing and protecting the data. Cassandra has a peer to peer distributed architecture which is easy to set up and manage. Cassandra’s architecture is capable of handling perabytes of information and thousands of users per second. This chapter includes the brief introduction to the Architecture of Cassandra.

Introduction to Architecture Continued

This section contains details about data distribution and replication in Cassandra. Replication in Cassandra is easy to configure. Replication helps the data to be stored in different physical racks. A pictorial representation of the schematic view of the replication among the nodes in a cluster is provided under this chapter. The key components of the Cassandra are Node, Data centre, Cluster, Commit Log, Mem-Table, SSTable and Bloom filter. These components are included in detail under this chapter.

Architecture Part 2

Cassandra NoSQL database is the best when it comes to replicating data between different data centres and cloud platforms. This section explains how Cassandra supports hybrid on-premise and cloud deployments. Cassandra also offers a location independent architecture while it comes to reading and writing data. The procedure of writing data in Cassandra is given in brief.

Cassandra also offers tuneable data consistency which means the developer can decide about the data consistency of their wish. The developer has different data consistency options to be used. The different operations of SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE and DELETE of data consistency are explained with examples under this chapter.

Section 2: Deployment

Deployment

There is always a difference between deploying Cassandra in non production project and production project. When planning a Cassandra cluster deployment there are few important things to be considered. These things are listed below

• Memory
• CPU
• Disk
• Network

All these factors are explained in detail in this section.

Deployment Continued

Another major part of planning the Cassandra Cluster deployment is to understand the various node configuration properties. Under this section you will learn about the various configuration decisions to be taken before deploying a Cassandra cluster whether it is a single node or multi node or multi data centre cluster. The properties of configuration are mentioned below

• Storage Settings
• Gossip Settings – Purging Gossip state on a node
• Partitioner Settings –
• Snitch Settings – Configuring the Property file snitch

These properties are explained in detail in this chapter

Section 3: Replication and Sharding

Replication

Replication is the process of storing copies of data on several nodes to make sure that the data is reliable and without any faults.  Caching is a form of replication. Replication in Cassandra helps to provide high performance and continuous availability. Because of replication if a machine fails due to the partition the cluster will still be able to make the data available. The other topics included in this chapter are

• Replication factor – Cassandra has a configurable replication factor which lets you to know how much performance is required to attain more consistency. The consistency level for reading and writing data depends totally on the replication factor as it denotes the number of nodes through which you have replicated data.
• Replication Strategy – This is also known as the placement strategy. This strategy determines how the replicas has to be distributed. Choosing the right replication strategy is very important because it is this strategy which determines which nodes are responsible for key ranges and which nodes are responsible for writing data. The different strategies are simple strategy, old network topology strategy and network topology strategy. These strategies are explained in detail under this chapter with few examples. Pictorial representation of Replica for a particular row key for different strategies are given in this chapter for your easy understanding.

Sharding

Sharding is also known as Shared Nothing architecture. Adding Sharding to your Cassandra architecture is yet another way to scale a relational database. This method has been used by large websites like eBay. Sharding means dividing the data into different portions and hosting them separately instead of hosting it all in a single server. In Sharding there is no shared state and each node is considered independent. In order to shard the data you first need to find a good key in which the records should be ordered. You can shard the data based on certain factors related to the data.

There are three basic strategies to find out shard structure

• Feature based Shard
• Key Based Shard
• Lookup Table

These strategies are explained in detail under this chapter.

Sharding helps to scale more precisely. It’s good to learn about Sharding in Cassandra as it helps to know about the data distribution across nodes.

Section 4: Performance Monitoring Strategies

Performance Monitoring Strategies

Performance monitoring has become more common these days. Companies are obsessive about performance monitoring. There are a lot of tools and metrics to monitor the performance these days. Cassandra mainly deals with scalability and in order to scale it is necessary to monitor the performance. In Cassandra it is important to monitor the performance of clusters and make predictions.

Through monitoring you will be able to identify slowdowns and resource limitations. There are few areas in Cassandra which necessarily requires performance monitoring. These areas are

• Read and Write requests
• Read and Write Latency
• Disk Space
• Frequency and Duration
• Errors and Overruns

Cassandra Performance Metrics

There are different type of performance metrics in Cassandra. Each metric type has its own API and use case. But only few metric types are more popular among the developers. The different metric types included under this chapter are

• Gauges
• Counter
• Meter
• Histogram
• Timer

These metrics are explained in detail with example. The other topics covered under this chapter are

• JMX
• JConsole
• Gauges Vs Counters
• Metric Units
• Monitoring Platforms – Graphite, Grafana, InfluxDB, Ganglia, CollectD, Hosted
• Throughput – Read throughput, Write Throughput
• Latency – Read Latency, Write Latency
• Disk Usage
• Garbage Collection
• Errors and Overruns

FAQ’s General Questions

• Why is this course considered more popular ?

Cassandra is widely used by many companies across the world. Some important examples are Facebook, Twitter and IBM. It helps the companies to store perabytes of data and handles huge data across multiple data centers. This feature makes it more popular among the modern businesses. As it becomes more popular the job prospective of Cassandra is also growing at a higher rate. Thus learning Cassandra will help you get placed in a reputed company and earn a good salary.

• What does this course provide to the professionals ?

If you become a Cassandra Certified professional you will become an expert in the big data industry. You will be able to get placed for a high salary. You will be well equipped to take your organization towards big data analytics using Cassandra. You will be more experienced to handle huge amount of data. By becoming a certified Cassandra professional you will be leading in the big data technology which is expected to be in demand for the next few years. Cassandra professional will also be able to benefit from the shortage of Cassandra trained professional. The certified professionals can get placed as Senior Software Professional, Database developers, IT consultants, Lead software professional and Data base Administrators.

• What is the average salary of certified Cassandra Professional ?

As per a recent survey, the average salary of a certified professional in this field can range from $50000 to $150000.

Testimonials

Camelia

First of all thanks to educba for providing this platform. It was a wonderful experience and learning from this course. The course was very informative and it helped me a lot to understand the Cassandra Database of NoSQL. This is a very beneficial course for those who are keen to learn about Cassandra. The content in the course is well constructed and each topic is well explained. All the complex concepts are explained in a very elegant way. This course helped me a lot to enhance my knowledge about Cassandra. Overall a perfect course on Cassandra.

Mishra

This course provides complete in and out of the Cassandra Database. The course is well divided into different lessons and lets easy progress of the course. I am so impressed with the methodology used in the course. The topic explanations are easy to understand. The content of the course is well designed and nicely delivered. This course gave my career a good start as most of the important concepts are compiled in just one course. Excellent material and good tutoring. Highly recommended course. Thanks to educba.

Back to top ^