Building Apache Cassandra Databases

NoSQL Overview

• Justifying non-relational data stores
• Listing the categories of NoSQL Data Stores

Exploring Cassandra

• Defining column family data stores
• Surveying Cassandra
• Dissecting the basic Cassandra architecture

Querying Cassandra

• Defining Cassandra Query Language, CQL
• Enumerating CQL data types
• Manipulating data from the cqlsh interface

Leveraging Cassandra structures and types

• Drawing comparisons with the relational model
• Organising data with keyspaces, tables and columns
• Creating collections and counters

Modelling data based on queries

• Designing tables around access patterns
• Clustering with compound primary keys
• Improving data distribution with composite partition Keys

Detailing tunable consistency

• Identifying consistency levels
• Selecting appropriate read and write consistency levels
• Distinguishing consistency repair features

Balancing consistency and performance

• Relating replication factor and consistency
• Trading consistency for availability
• Achieving linearisable consistency with Compare-And-Set

Working with Cassandra collection types

• Grouping elements in sets
• Ordering elements in lists
• Expressing relationships with maps
• Nesting collections

Storing data for easy retrieval

• Mapping data to tuples and user defined types
• Investigating the frozen keyword
• Applying the Valueless Columns Pattern
• Strategic implementation of clustering columns

Controlling data life span

• Expiring temporal data with time-to-live
• Reviewing how tombstones achieve distributed deletes
• Executing DELETEs and UPDATEs in the future

Constructing materialised views and time series

• Modelling time series data
• Enhancing queries with materialised views
• Materialised views maintained in the application
• Driving analytics from materialised views

Managing triggers

• Creating triggers by implementing ITrigger
• Attaching triggers to tables
• Supporting materialised views with triggers

Querying Cassandra data with the Datastax Java Driver

• Connecting to a Cassandra cluster
• Running CQL through the Java Driver
• Batching prepared statements
• Paginating large queries

Persisting Java Objects with Kundera

• Defining the Java Persistence Architecture, JPA
• Configuring Kundera to work with Cassandra
• Generating schemas automatically
• Managing JPA transactions in Kundera

Leveraging built-in Cassandra connectors

• Loading data into Hadoop MapReduce with the Cassandra InputFormat
• Utilising the Cassandra Loader to create Pig relations
• Converting a Cassandra table to a Hive table with the Casssandra serialiser/deserialiser (SerDe)