Installing and using Apache Cassandra With Java

I’m going to write a few postings on how to use the Cassandra database with Java, although i am in no way an expert on how to use Cassandra i am very intrigued about the database because of it’s small installation, high performance and scalability. During the writing of these posts i am also learning the Cassandra database and i’m sharing my experiences with it through my posts on this blog.

Like i said before, Cassandra is a very high performing and scalable database, it doesn’t follow the normal SQL database principles like schema’s, tables / columns, datatypes and a query language like SQL. Instead it’s a non-relational database similar to Google’s BigTable. Cassandra was initially developed by Facebook which has contributed it to the open source community. Currently it is used by websites like Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Rackspace and many others. So even though it is still only version 0.6 at the time of writing this it has already proven itself in production environments.

Some of the key-features of Cassandra:

   * Fault Tolerant – Data is automatically replicated to multiple nodes for fault-tolerance. Replication across multiple data centers is supported. Failed nodes can be replaced with no downtime.
   * Decentralized – Every node in the cluster is identical. There are no network bottlenecks. There are no single points of failure.
   * Flexible – Read and write throughput both increase linearly as new machines are added, with no downtime or interruption to applications.
   * Highly Available – Writes and reads offer a tunable ConsistencyLevel, all the way from “writes never fail” to “block for all replicas to be readable,” with the quorum level in the middle.

Read more: Sodeso

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