Cassandra: Quick Installation & Download Notes & Details

A collection of notes and details. There’s plenty of details and docs out there, which I’ll reference a few below to get started with Cassandra. The goal with these notes is to provide a kind of summarized punch list of items to quickly get started around Cassandra/Datastax Enterprise 6 (DSE6). I’ll have a number of additional pieces coming real soon, as I’ve got some geeky experiments and related surprise implementations I’m putting together in the very near future. Let’s just say there will likely be Lego, trains, and many nodes among other fascinating elements coming together to make it happen! Enjoy the start…

The Big Details

  • Who – Avinash Lakshman (@hedvigeng) and Prashant Malik (@pmalik) originally developed Cassandra at Facebook for inbox search.
  • 2000px-Cassandra_logo.svgWhat – Apache Cassandra is a highly scalable, high-performance distributed database built with the ability to handle large amounts of structured data decentralized across many servers. In service of that goal Cassandra provides a highly available system without a single point of failure.
  • Where – Apache Cassandra can be found on the Apache Cassandra Site and the code in the Cassandra Github Repo.
  • When – Cassandra was released as open source by Facebook in 2008, and became an Apache top-level project in February of 2010.
  • Why – When you want no fixed schema, massive scale, huge storage capability options, eventually consistent, fault-tolerant, dynamic/elastic scalability, fast linear-scale performance, always on highly available, and related features.

Distributed Databases

Getting Started, Installing, Configuration, Setup, & Start

CQL – Cassandra Query Language

Intro & Architecture of Cassandra References

This is merely the beginning of the blogging, projects, and notes, if you’d like to bookmark where I’ll be linking all of my Datastax + Cassandra notes, check out my Cassandra root documentation & links page.