Advantages of Apache Cassandra Database

As one of the better-known NoSQL database, Apache Cassandra is fast becoming a preferred database of enterprises and SME’s alike. Its robust performance in applications needing heavy write systems traversing massive volumes of data is what makes it stand apart from its contemporaries.

A typical Cassandra database consists of keyspace (similar to a schema in a relational DBMS), column families (consistent with a table in a relational DBMS), and rows/columns. It also utilizes a Cassandra Query Language (just like SQL) to retrieve records, carry out actions, and communicate with the Cassandra database.

Here are five reasons why Cassandra makes for a great database system

1. No single point of failure

Its masterless architecture makes Cassandra highly fault tolerant. Because of this, any downtime affecting a few nodes will not impact the overall performance of the system.  This enhanced fault tolerance level is a great draw for enterprises who wish to provide ‘always-on’ online services to their customers.

If we look beyond a single datacenter then Cassandra can be of great help. It allows seamless replication of the data center, thus facilitating a strong disaster recovery and backup/retrieval system within your organization.

2. Handling massive datasets made easy

Hulu, NetFlix, Instagram, and Apple, the list of enterprise users who benefit from Cassandra speak a lot about its capability to handle humongous volumes and variety of data. If your organization too faces a probability of data volume expanding exponentially and scaling up at a rapid rate then you need not look beyond Cassandra.

You can rely on Cassandra to continue delivering optimized performance without any impact of the huge rapid change in the data it is handling

3. Logging is simplified

In today’s homogenous environment, a typical company has to deal with multiple clients and servers (Android, web, iOS to name a few). In such an environment, logging and analyzing logs become huge challenges to deal with. Cassandra comes across as a viable solution to centralized logging.

This way, your development team need not spend a lot of time on logging and can instead focus on better product development.

4. Fast reads and superfast writes

Workloads like metrics collection and logging need extremely fast writes for optimal performance. This is where Cassandra scores heavily over its peers. It offers a scalable read-write performance. This means that if you know a single server’s write performance, you can accurately assess how many servers are needed in a particular cluster to meet the performance expectations.

5. Active community support

A lot of young minds are focused on expanding the possibilities around Cassandra. They are highly active and provide assistance in case of issues around managing or configuring complex database setups using Cassandra. The monitoring and troubleshooting systems around the software make it a truly high-performance open source NoSQL database system.

Thus, it is clear that Cassandra offers a host of benefits that can add tremendous business value to your tech offerings. It is time that you explore Apache Cassandra for your enterprise database management needs.

The Amazing Cassandra

The Apache Cassandra- an open source distributed database has been a much-anticipated topic of debate, lately. It is a prime choice for the significant amount of App development and data management companies, working at fresh new start-ups and traditional legendary enterprises. It has become remarkably easy to perform the complete transition of a traditional database to an open source database since NoSQL took a leap by introducing the Apache Cassandra.

With a unique yet considerably efficient ability to offer a real-life performance and experience, Cassandra has been making the life of companies in web developments, software engineering, and Data analysis easy. No wonder why back in 2008 Prashant Malik and Avinash Lakshman initially originated the Cassandra at Facebook!

How Cassandra benefits businesses?

With an increasing number of businesses opting for the Apache Cassandra, let us have a brief at it advantages for a growing business.

1 – Elastic Scalability

Many say that elastic scalability is the biggest advantage of using the Apache Cassandra. As we have read above, as number of servers can be added, therefore, the now formed Cassandra cluster can be scaled up and down as you please without much hassle, i.e. without any downtime or pause occurring to the applications.

2 – Open Source

We have been hearing a lot about Apache Cassandra offering an Open Source service. What exactly does it mean? Being open source means- it is available to businesses for FREE! Yes, you read that right; you can download it without giving much thought to your pocket. It is not the end of the awesomeness that open sourcing offers, it has a huge Cassandra community where niche-specific people can come together and discuss various aspects of this huge open source projects. It is even compatible to be used with other Apache projects.

3 – Peer to Peer Architecture

Unlike a master-slave form of working, the Apache Cassandra follows a peer-to-peer architecture for execution, thus, resulting in rare chances for failure. This makes it possible to add as many servers as your business wants in data centers to make a Cassandra cluster. It means that all the servers are at the same level and any machine can answer the request from a client.

4 – Fault Tolerance

Usually, what worries any business the most is whether or not the stored data is safe? Well, Apache Cassandra not only secures the data but stores it at multiple locations. Even if one server fails, or someone hacks it, the user is able to retrieve the data with utmost ease from another location. It is up to your choice how many replications you want to create which is then activated by the high-level backup and recovery competencies of Cassandra.

5 – Great Analytics possibilities

There are 4 key methods of carrying out analytics on Cassandra

1. Solr based integrated search
2. Batch analytics integrating Hadoop with Cassandra
3. External batch analytics powered by Hadoop and Cloudera/Hortonworks
4. Spark based near real time analytics

This significantly expands the range and usage of analytics using Cassandra.

So, it is safe to say that Apache Cassandra is a total win-win situation for any organization using the solution. Be it high performance, predictable scaling, distributed database characteristic, or 100% uptime, Cassandra scores heavily on these parameters and emerges as the preferred open-source distributed NoSQL database management system.