Getting Up and Running with Cassandra

As an application developer, you have almost certainly worked with databases extensively. You must have built products using relational databases such as MySQL and PostgreSQL, and perhaps experimented with NoSQL databases including a document store such as MongoDB or a key value store such as Redis. While each of these tools has its strengths, you will now consider whether a distributed database such as Cassandra might be the best choice for the task at hand.

In this chapter, we'll begin with the need for NoSQL databases to satisfy the conundrum of ever-growing data. We will see why NoSQL databases are becoming the de facto choice for big data and real-time web applications. We will also talk about the major reasons to choose Cassandra from among the many database options available to you. Having established that Cassandra is a great choice, we'll go through the nuts and bolts of getting a local Cassandra installation up and running. By the end of this chapter, you'll know the following:

• What big data is and why relational databases are not a good choice
• When and why Cassandra is a good choice for your application
• How to install Cassandra on your development machine
• How to interact with Cassandra using cqlsh
• How to create a keyspace, table, and write a simple query