Are you seeking an incredibly powerful and highly scalable distributed database for your data management needs? If so, then take a moment to learn more about Apache Cassandra.
In this article, we will review the features, pros, and cons of Apache Cassandra and how it could significantly benefit your business.
Latest release: 4.1.0
Release date: 13th Dec 2022
What is Apache Cassandra?
Apache Cassandra is an incredibly versatile, robust NoSQL distributed database. Many companies have chosen this open-source platform to power their mission-critical data due to its unrivaled scalability and world-class fault tolerance – all on consumer hardware or cloud infrastructure.
Cassandra database offers an extraordinary level of distributed storage, combining the strengths of Amazon’s Dynamo with Google’s Bigtable technology. In addition, it provides a multi-datacenter cluster that can ensure minimal latency operations for all involved.
A masterless replication system makes this sophisticated setup possible – streamlining data availability across multiple locations and creating more efficient systems than ever before.
More about Apache Cassandra
- Its databases are distributed means it runs multiple machines.
- Distributed architecture brings more technical power.
- It can use multiple nodes since it is a distributed database.
- Node is a single instance of Cassandra, and it communicates with another node called gossip.
- Cassandra db is popular because it allows developers to change their databases quickly and easily as needed.
- Cassandra is designed to store more data. It can add extra parts (called nodes). No need for RAM or more CPU power
- This helps it use lower-cost hardware while increasing the data it can manage.
- Partitions are introduced in Cassandra, which is responsible for distributing the data among nodes.
- One piece of data can be copied and stored on multiple nodes. This makes it more reliable and means that if something goes wrong, there is still another copy.
- Cassandra can help you make sure that your data is safe. It creates multiple copies of your data, called a replication factor.
- Cassandra is an Available partition-tolerant type of database that is always on. This means it will stay working even if something goes wrong.
- It is deployment agnostic.
Features
- Easy to run open source platform
- Masterless architecture with low latency
- Flexible and fault tolerant
- Good performance by focusing on quality
- It uses Query language (QL), which is similar to SQL.
- Scalable, read, and write throughput increase linearly as new machines are added, with no downtime or interruption to applications.
- Security and observability
- The audit logging feature helps us keep track of changes to our data, like creating or deleting things, with minimal impact on how fast the system runs.
- Zero Copy Streaming can make things up to five times faster than before. In addition, it works especially well in cloud and Kubernetes environments, making them more elastic.
Some screenshots of Cassandra’s features
Data Center demo
Cassandra Note
Architecture of Cassandra
8 Instruction Steps to Get Started With Apache Cassandra
- Get Cassandra using the docker.
- Start Cassandra
- Create files
- Load data with CQLSH
- Interactive CQLSH
- Read some data
- Write some data
- Clean up
Cassandra Query Language
Cassandra has a special language called Cassandra Query Language (CQL) that people use to talk to the database. CQL makes it easier for developers to write and read data from the database and hides how the database is built behind a simple interface.
The CQL shell interface, cqlsh, can be used on the command line of a node to create and modify keyspaces and tables, change data, insert things into tables, query tables, and more.
It comes with multi-data types like String, Numeric, Geo sparicle, Date and time, Collection, Blob, Boolean, etc.
Cassandra is a type of database that works differently from other databases. To use Cassandra, you must know different ways to store and get data.
For example, a “keyspace” in Cassandra is like a SQL database, and a “column family” is like a SQL table. Therefore, you must use special words and syntax when creating and changing data in Cassandra.
Pros and Cons of Apache Cassandra
Pros
- It deals with a large amount of unstructured data
- The partition tolerance feature is useful
- It acts like a distributer among all clusters
Cons
- Bit hard to learn in the initial stage
- Features of SQL queries are not found.
- Only one commercial version and licensing cost is high
- Cassandra is incapable of joining, making it a challenge to use it for more complicated things like online transactions.
- No translation support
- Not suitable for OLTP-type transaction-oriented and high-concurrency systems
- Some users are suggesting architecture be improved
- No sufficient video presentation for trainers
FAQs
How is Cassandra better than SQL?
Cassandra helps you get better performance in real time. It allows you to write data many times to retrieve it more quickly. SQL only lets you write data once, which makes it slower to use.
Conclusion
Apache Cassandra has proven itself as a powerful, distributed NoSQL database in big data. With its flexible data model, massive scalability, and reliable availability, it is the go-to choice for companies and individuals to store their valuable data.
Our goal with this blog post was to provide complete information about Apache Cassandra with its workflow, features, and pros and cons so that users could make informed decisions about using this technology. In addition, this knowledge will aid in your understanding of this great software.
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