a Distributed Data at Web Scale Eben Hewitt Foreword by Jonathan Ellis, Apache Cassandra Project Chair O'REILLY”Cassandra: The Definitive Guide by Eben Hewitt Copyright © 2011 Eben Hewitt, All rights reserved, Printed in the United States of America. Published by O°Reilly Media, Inc., 1005 Gravenstein Highway North, Sebastopol, CA 95472. (O7Reilly books may be purchased for educational, business, or sales promotional use. Online editions are also available for most titles (kttp:/iny safaribooksonline.com). For more information, contact our corporate/institutional sales department: (800) 998-9938 or corporate@oretlly. com. Editor: Mike Loukides Indexer: Ellen Trourman Zaig Production Editor: Holly Bauer Cover Designer: Karen Montgomery Copyeditor: Genevieve d’Fntremont Interior Designer: David Fusato Proofreader: Emily Quill Mlustrator:, Rober: Romano Printing History: Noveniber 2010: Furst Edition. Nutshell Handbook, the Nutshell Handbook logo, aurd the O’Reilly logo are registered trademarks of OReilly Media, Inc. Cassandra: The Definitive Guide, the image of a Paradise flycatcher, and related trade dress are trademarks of O'Reilly Media, Inc Many of the designations used by manufacturers and sellers to distingnish their products are claimned as trademarks. Where those designations appear in this book, and O’Reilly Media, Inc. was aware of a trademark claim, the designations have been printed in caps or initial caps. While every precaution has been taken in the preparation of this book, the publisher and author assume no responsibility for errors or omissions, or for damages resulting from the use of the information con: tained herein, Repkover. FH This book uses RepKover™, a durable and flexible lay-flat binding, ISBN: 978-1.449-39041.9 IM} 1304023728Foreword ....... Preface ...........05 1. Table of Contents Introducing Cassandra ....... What's Wrong with Relational Databases? 1 A Quick Review of Relationall Databases 6 RDBMS: The Awesome and the Not-So-Much 6 Web Scale 12 The Cassandra Elevator Pitch 14 Cassandra in 50 Words or Less 14 Distributed and Decentralized 14 Elastic Scalability 16 High Availability and Fault Tolerance 16 Tuncable Consistency 17 Brewer's CAP Theorem 19 Row-Oriented 23 Schemna-Free 24 High Performance 24 Where Did Cassandra Come From? 24 Use Cases for Cassandra 2 Large Deployments 25 Lots of Writes, Statistics, and Analysis 26 Geographical Distribution, 26 Evolving Applications 26 Who Is Using Cassandra? 26 Summary 28 Installing Cassandra Installiug the Binary 29 Extracting the Download 29