Cassandra Database
Cassandra is a highly scalable, distributed NoSQL database management system designed to handle large amounts of data across many commodity servers, providing high availability with no single point of failure. Here is an in-depth look at Cassandra:
History
- Cassandra was initially developed at Facebook to power the Inbox search feature, starting around 2007.
- In July 2008, it was open-sourced as part of the Apache Software Foundation, becoming an Apache Incubator project.
- It became a top-level Apache project in February 2010.
Key Features
- Decentralized Architecture: No master node; each node is identical, providing fault tolerance and scalability.
- Scalability: Capable of handling petabytes of data with linear scalability.
- High Availability: Data is automatically replicated to multiple nodes for fault tolerance.
- Tunable Consistency: Offers eventual consistency by default, but users can choose strong consistency where needed.
- Column-Oriented: Data is stored in a column-family model, similar to Google's Bigtable.
- Write-Optimized: Designed for write-heavy workloads, making it ideal for logging and time-series data.
- Support for Multi-Data Center Replication: Allows replication across different geographic locations.
Use Cases
- Time-Series Data: Ideal for applications that require tracking changes over time.
- Product Catalogs: Efficient for managing large catalogs with frequent updates.
- Event Logging: Perfect for capturing system or user events in real-time.
- Content Management: Suitable for content delivery networks or content management systems.
Architecture
The architecture of Cassandra is based on the following principles:
- Peer-to-Peer: Every node in the cluster can accept read and write requests, regardless of where the coordinator node is.
- Gossip Protocol: Nodes use gossip for peer discovery, failure detection, and metadata propagation.
- Partitioners: Data is partitioned using hash functions to distribute data evenly across nodes.
- Replication: Data replication is managed through replication strategies like SimpleStrategy and NetworkTopologyStrategy.
Programming Languages
Cassandra can be accessed using various drivers and client libraries in languages like:
- Java
- Python
- C#
- JavaScript (Node.js)
- Go
References
Related Topics