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
- Solr based integrated search
- Batch analytics integrating Hadoop with Cassandra
- External batch analytics powered by Hadoop and Cloudera/Hortonworks
- 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.
