Learning Cassandra for Administrators

Understand the immense capabilities of Cassandra in managing large amounts of data and learn how to ensure that data is always available. This practical, hands-on guide takes you through every stage from installation to performance tuning.

Overview

• Install and set up a multi datacenter Cassandra
• Troubleshoot and tune Cassandra
• Covers CAP tradeoffs, physical/hardware limitations, and helps you understand the magic
• Tune your kernel, JVM, to maximize the performance
• Includes security, monitoring metrics, Hadoop configuration, and query tracing

In Detail

Apache Cassandra is a massively scalable open source NoSQL database. Cassandra is perfect for managing large amounts of structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data across multiple data centers and the cloud. Cassandra delivers linear scalability and performance across many commodity servers with no single point of failure.

This book starts by explaining how to derive the solution, basic concepts, and CAP theorem. You will learn how to install and configure a Cassandra cluster as well as tune the cluster for performance. After reading the book, you should be able to understand why the system works in a particular way, and you will also be able to find patterns (and/or use cases) and anti-patterns which would potentially cause performance degradation. Furthermore, the book explains how to configure Hadoop, vnodes, multi-DC clusters, enabling trace, enabling various security features, and querying data from Cassandra.

Starting with explaining about the trade-offs, we gradually learn about setting up and configuring high performance clusters. This book will help the administrators understand the system better by understanding various components in Cassandra’s architecture and hence be more productive in operating the cluster. This book talks about the use cases and problems, anti-patterns, and potential practical solutions as opposed to raw techniques. You will learn about kernel and JVM tuning parameters that can be adjusted to get the maximum use out of system resources.

What you will learn from this book

• Explore trade-offs and basic concepts
• Install Cassandra, choose hardware, and configure the cluster
• Query and insert data and CQL
• Get to grips with performance tuning
• Find out about Hadoop integration and evolving apps
• Discover anti-patterns and how to secure your cluster

Approach

This book is a practical, hands-on guide, taking the reader from the basics of using Cassandra though to the installation and the running.

Who this book is written for

Learning Cassandra for Administrators is for administrators who manage a large deployment of Cassandra clusters, and support engineers who would like to install the monitoring tools and who are also in charge of making sure the cluster stays the same, ensuring that the service is always up and running.