Apache Cassandra

Apache Cassandra



What is Apache Cassandra?

Apache Cassandra is an open source distributed database system is designed to store and manage huge amount of data across servers. It is highly scalable and consistent. Cassandra is a scalable NoSQL database. It can maintain structured, semi-structured and un-structured data with no single point of failure.
             
Originally Cassandra created for Facebook. Cassandra consists of distributed system techniques from Amazon Dynamo and the data model from Google's BigTable. Cassandra was open source in Feb 2008 by Facebook. Cassandra first started as an incubation project at Apache in January of 2009.  

Below are some of the basic concepts in Apache Cassandra:

Cluster: The machines in a logical Cassandra instance
Keyspace: A container for ColumnFamilies. In simple words, it is very similar to RDBMS database.
ColumnFamilies: Container for columns.
Column: It is a triplet which contains name, value and a timestamp.
SuperColumns: Can be thought as columns that themselves have subcolumns.

Cassandra download link: Cassandra is java based open source application. You can download Cassandra from the following location.

http://cassandra.apache.org/download/

Cassandra Source code: You can download Cassandra source code from the following location.

git clone http://git-wip-us.apache.org/repos/asf/cassandra.git