Cassandra Tutorial: An Ultimate Guide In 6 Points
Introduction
Welcome to this comprehensive Cassandra tutorial. Cassandra is a distributed database from Apache to handle large amounts of data based on high performance across several commodity servers for providing high availability and no single point of failure. It is a robust NoSQL database system for high availability and scalable distribution database for structures, semi-structured and unstructured data.
It essentially collects and handles unstructured data. Data is placed on different machines with more than one replication factor for providing higher availability. So Cassandra tutorials begin with a basic introduction followed by how to perform operations and many exciting features to offer ultimate guidance as Cassandra tutorials for beginners as well as professionals.
In this article let us look at:
- What is Apache Cassandra?
- What is a NoSQL database?
- Features of Cassandra
- Applications of Apache Cassandra
- Advantages of Apache Cassandra architecture
- Disadvantages of Apache Cassandra architecture
1. What is Apache Cassandra?
It is extremely crucial to understand the difference between a NoSQL and RDBMS before joining Cassandra tutorials. An RDBMS can only handle low volumes of structured data for simple transactions. It can gather data from a few locations and can have a single point of failure. NoSQL offers better functionality as it can handle high volumes of unstructured data. It can handle simple transactions with a single point of failure and data arriving from many sources.
It is a column-oriented database, fault-tolerant, follows a Dynamo-style replication model and adds a more powerful “column family” data model. Apache Cassandra is an extremely scalable, open-source powerful NoSQL. It is currently a part of the Apache Software Foundation and one can easily get Apache Cassandra tutorial online.
2. What is a NoSQL database?
A Not Only SQL provides a set of a database for storing and retrieving data which may not necessarily be in standard tabular format. It has a simple design, is scalable horizontally and can acute control over availability. These databases are also schema-free, handle easy replication, contain simple API and can handle large amounts of data. It even shares common features and attributes.
3. Features of Cassandra
When you enroll for Cassandra tutorials, you will gain knowledge of Cassandra architecture as follows:
- Installation of additional hardware for increasing customers and hence it is highly scalable.
- Cassandra writes and rewrites throughput faster without affecting the reading efficiency as new machines are added with no downtime or interruption to applications.
- It supports ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation and Durability) compliance.
- It is suitable for all the applications which cannot afford to lose data, even if the entire data center shuts. There are no bottlenecks in the network and so no single point of failure. Each node is identical.
- It facilitates easy distribution by replicating it across multiple data centers hence providing flexibility. It provides lower latency can survive regional outages. Failure nodes can be replaced with no downtime.
- It can store all formats of data like structures, semi-structured and unstructured and hence is highly flexible.
- You can also increase the throughput and stream data by enhancing the number of nodes or datacenter during peak traffic times. This is because of fast linear performance on commodity hardware or cloud infrastructure.
- With less impact on the normal workload performance, the audit logging operations track DML, DDL and DCL for capturing and replaying the production workload for analysis.
- Cassandra outperforms other popular alternatives in benchmark and real applications because of architectural choices.
- Cassandra is a key-value database with data stored as rows and columns and each table containing a primary key. Also, it has a limited SQL interface.
4. Applications of Apache Cassandra
Apache Cassandra is widely used. So before enrolling for Cassandra tutorials let us have a look at the applications of Apache Cassandra:
- Mobile messaging services.
- Retail applications for product catalog lookups and inputs.
- Social media analysis and providing solutions to customers
- Web analysis
- Monitoring and tracking of applications.
5. Advantages of Apache Cassandra architecture
With the help of Cassandra tutorials, you will understand that the Cassandra database tutorial has the following advantages:
- Outperforms other NoSQL databases regarding performance benchmarks.
- Real-time processing of large data.
- Addition and Deletion of a machine from the cluster without downtime.
- Each node in the cluster is identical and hence there can be no bottleneck in the system.
- No single point of failure as it is highly fault-tolerant and in case of any node failure others can take over and finish the task.
6. Disadvantages of Apache Cassandra architecture
- No aggregation of data like a relational database. Such aggregations have to be pre-computed and stored.
- No joining of tables, so data has to be denormalized before getting stored.
- Additional search clauses or conditions are not supported. Only keys or indexes can be searched.
- No sorting on non-key fields.
Conclusion
Cassandra tutorials will very much beneficial as Cassandra is growing day by day and is becoming more popular. As the data is going unlimited, there is a huge acceptance for Cassandra and there is a huge shift in the organizations from the traditional RDBMS to NoSQL. This further increases the scope for Apache Cassandra. Hence, the need to learn data modeling in Cassandra is exponential.
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