The rising popularity of Apache Cassandra rests on its ability to handle very large data sets that include hundreds of terabytes -- and that's why this distributed database has been chosen by organizations such as Facebook, Twitter, Digg, and Rackspace. With this hands-on guide, you'll get all the details and practical examples you need to understand Cassandra's non-relational database design and put it to work in a production environment.

Author Eben Hewitt (Java SOA Cookbook) pays special attention to data modeling, and demonstrates Cassandra's many advantages, including its high availability, eventual consistency model, and ability to scale easily. If you're a developer with a startup, you'll learn how to future-proof your application by implementing Cassandra before your storage needs become critical. Join the growing list data-intensive organizations that have come to rely on Cassandra's design. This book shows you how.

Understand the tenets of Cassandra's column-oriented structure

Get best practices for configuring, monitoring, and performance tuning

Learn how to write, update, and read Cassandra data

Discover how Cassandra's distributed design lets you add or remove nodes from the cluster as your application requires

Get examples for writing clients in Java, Python, and C#

Extend Cassandra by integrating it with the Hadoop framework