Sebastopol, CA—What could you do with data if scalability wasn't a problem? With this hands-on guide, you'll learn how Apache Cassandra handles hundreds of terabytes of data while remaining highly available across multiple data centers—capabilities that have attracted Facebook, Twitter, and other data-intensive companies. Cassandra: The Definitive Guide provides the technical details and practical examples you need to assess this database management system and put it to work in a production environment.

"Cassandra has surged in popularity in recent months given its focus on performance, durability, and scalability," says author Eben Hewitt.?"We're starting to see more and more solutions becoming available?in the non-relational data space, due in part to the?massive amounts of data that the web is generating. Because it's so easy to scale Cassandra given its symmetrical peer-to-peer design, wrangling huge amounts of data is not only possible, but straightforward. Cassandra?fits as many different use cases as the relational model does. It can be used for logging and monitoring, as a source for analytics with tools like Hadoop, and for modeling sparse data in which your entities are similarly, but perhaps not identically, constructed."

Hewitt demonstrates the advantages of Cassandra's nonrelational design, and pays special attention to data modeling. If you're a developer, DBA, application architect, or manager looking to solve a database scaling issue or future-proof your application, this guide shows you how to harness Cassandra's speed and flexibility.

With Cassandra: The Definitive Guide, you will:

• Understand the tenets of Cassandra's column-oriented structure
• Learn how to write, update, and read Cassandra data
• Discover how to add or remove nodes from the cluster as your application requires
• Examine a working application that translates from a relational model to Cassandra's data model
• Use examples for writing clients in Java, Python, and C#
• Use the JMX interface to monitor a cluster's usage, memory patterns, and more
• Tune memory settings, data storage, and caching for better performance

"After reading this book, you'll be able to install, manage, and monitor Cassandra, and you'll be able to use proven design patterns to create a meaningful design using Cassandra's column family and super column family facets," Hewitt assures. "This makes it easy for developers to write data-driven web sites or other tools for social media, geolocation, usage data, analytics, and much more."