What is Apache Cassandra?
Apache Cassandra is an open-source NoSQL and highly scalable database designed especially to handle a large amount of data. Apache Cassandra is a perfect data platform characterized by highly available, fault tolerance and linear scalability.
It is an Apache community product and freely available. Cassandra allows to store and manage structured and unstructured data across multiple commodity servers.
Apache Cassandra was introduced from the need to use data models differently from those used in relational databases, such as with Oracle, MySQL or SQL Server.
In order to allow very low latencies, have millions of data distributed globally, read and write from anywhere, scale nodes flexibly, have greater availability against failures and reduce the operational costs of equipment and software.
Features of Apache Cassandra
Apache Cassandra is famous because of the following features:
- Always on architecture
- Scalable Architecture
- Flexible data storage
- CQL (Cassandra Query Language)
- Flexible and Dynamic Data Model
- Transaction support
- Data Compression
Benefits of Apache Cassandra:
- Allows read/write replication between geographically distributed multi- datacentres.
- The nodes can increase or decrease in a massive way.
- Data and nodes are continuously available, which allows the system to continuously operate.
- All nodes have the ability to read/write, which means that it is decentralized architecture, avoiding network bottlenecks.
- Apache Cassandra can handle different data models, both relational and non-relational, with high read and write rates.
- Linear scalability increases nodes, without producing production losses, immediately recognizing the improvement in system performance.
- It can support strong or eventual data consistency through a distributed cluster of nodes.
- Failed node is easily restored or replaced.
- Cassandra uses CQL Language (Cassandra Query Language).
- The data is strongly protected by means of a transaction log system, and with an included backup and restoration system.
- It allows high compression rate without losing performance.
Applications of Apache Cassandra:
- Analyzing data from social networks, allowing them to make recommendations to their customers.
- Apache Cassandra can be installed in IoT devices for data management from a multitude of sensors.
- Used in time series data applications, in case of climate data, thanks to the read/write speed it provides.
- Used in messaging applications, to store the data of the conversations and other shared content.
- Tracking and monitoring user activity in E-commerce, music and Video Streaming sites.
Hope now you know what exactly is Apache Cassandra and its benefits and applications.
