Apache Cassandra: Tutorial & Best Practices

A distributed NoSQL database management system that is used to store and retrieve data for applications.

Apache Cassandra is a distributed NoSQL database management system designed to handle large amounts of data across many commodity servers, providing high availability with no single point of failure. It is based on the "Big Table" design, which was developed by Google.

To install and configure Cassandra on a Linux machine, you will need to perform the following steps:

Install the Java Development Kit (JDK) on your machine. Cassandra is written in Java, so you will need to have the JDK installed to run it.
Download the latest version of Cassandra from the Apache Cassandra website (https://cassandra.apache.org/download/).
Extract the downloaded file to a directory on your machine.
Open the Cassandra configuration file, which is located at /etc/cassandra/conf/cassandra.yaml, in a text editor.
Modify the configuration file to specify the desired settings for your Cassandra installation. For example, you may want to specify the cluster name, the listen address, and the seed nodes.
Start Cassandra by running the cassandra executable file located in the bin directory within the Cassandra installation directory.

Some advantages of using Cassandra include:

Scalability: Cassandra is designed to scale horizontally across multiple commodity servers, making it easy to add more capacity as needed.
Fault tolerance: Cassandra uses a distributed architecture and replication to ensure that data is always available, even if individual nodes fail.
High performance: Cassandra is optimized for fast writes and reads, making it suitable for applications that require low latencies.

Some drawbacks of using Cassandra include:

Complexity: Cassandra can be difficult to learn and configure, especially for users who are unfamiliar with distributed systems.
Limited flexibility: Cassandra is not as flexible as some other NoSQL databases, as it does not support complex data types such as arrays or nested documents.
Limited querying capabilities: Cassandra does not support the full SQL language, and its query language (CQL) is somewhat limited compared to other databases.