Cassandra Tutorial

Cassandra Tutorial

Cassandra is an extremely scalable, high performance distributed NoSQL database that is structured to manage great amounts of data across many service servers. Apache Cassandra provides high availability with not a single point of failure. Here, let us first understand the term NoSQL Database.

Actually a NoSQL Database also called as Not Only SQL is a database which has the machinery to store and retrieve data with simple query other than the tabular relations used in the RDBMS. This type of database supports easy replication and is schema-free with simple API, consistent and can control huge data. Thus, Apache Cassandra is a distributed, open-source and decentralized storage management system.

Why do we need to learn Cassandra?

Cassandra was initially invented at Facebook for an inbox search. After that, it was made open-sourced by Facebook in July 2008. Later on, Apache Incubator accepted it in March 2009 and then it was made Apache top-level project since February 2010.

Cassandra manages a large amount of structured data spread out across the world with no chance of failure. It is really faulted tolerant and consistent. It is a column-based database that implements a Dynamo-style replication model but enhances a more dominant “column family” data model.

Today, Cassandra is used by few biggest companies such as Facebook, Twitter, Cisco, eBay, Netflix, Rackspace, Twitter, etc.

Applications of Cassandra

• Cassandra is popular in the present context due to its better technical features.
• Cassandra allows increasing more hardware to accommodate more clients and more data if needed.
• Since it has no failure option, it supports business and its critical applications that cannot afford any failure.
• It has a fast quick response time that increases linear scale performance.
• Cassandra dynamically accommodates all data formats like structured, semi-structured and unstructured.
• It is able to distribute data with flexibility wherever we need by replicating data across multiple centers.
• It also supports Transaction with ACID properties like atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability.
• It is designed to execute low product hardware, achieves fast writes, and able to store hundreds of terabytes of data, without losing the efficiency of reading.

Example

Cassandra query language is used to access Cassandra through its nodes. In CQL, a Keyspace is a namespace that describes data replication on nodes. Coders use cqlsh a quick to work with CQL or other application language drivers.

Creating a Keyspace using Cqlsh with Syntax

CREATE KEYSPACE <identifier> WITH <properties>

For example,

cqlsh.> CREATE KEYSPACE learnCQl.com WITH
replication = {'class':'Simpleplan', 'replication_factor' : 3};

Also, let’s create a table using CQL syntax:

CREATE (TABLE | COLUMNFAMILY) <tablename>
('<column-definition>' , '<column-definition>')
(WITH <option> AND <option>)

We can define a Column like this:

column name1 data type,
column name2 data type,

Like:

age int,
name text

For example,
cqlsh> USE learnCQl;
cqlsh: learnCQl>; CREATE TABLE studs(
studs_id int PRIMARY KEY,
studs_name text,
studs_city text,
studs_phone varint
);

It created a table with columns studs_id, studs_name, studs_city, and studs_phone.

Prerequisites

You can learn Cassandra tutorial if you have interest in Database management and you can visit the official website for more details cassandra.apache.org

In terms of prerequisites, if you have basic knowledge of JAVA programming then it is a simple tutorial and we can easily understand all the concepts. In addition to this, it would be great if you have any prior knowledge of database queries and any of the Linux ideas.

Target Audience

Apache Cassandra is an exceptionally useful topic for software specialists, especially those who are aimed to learn the wires of Cassandra and also deal with practice.