What this book covers

Chapter 1, Getting Your Cassandra Cluster Ready, gives an introduction to Cassandra and helps you to set up your cluster. It also introduces you to the various configuration options available to set up your cluster, which can be referred to while fine tuning the cluster.

Chapter 2, An Architectural Overview, helps you to understand the internal architecture of a Cassandra cluster. It details various strategies used by Cassandra to distribute data among various nodes in the cluster. It describes how Cassandra becomes highly available by employing various replication strategies. It also clarifies various replication and data distribution strategies.

Chapter 3, Creating Database and Schema, details the concepts used by Cassandra. We'll learn to use CQL (Cassandra Query Language), which is used by Cassandra clients to describe data models, to create our databases and tables. Also, we'll discuss various techniques provided by Cassandra that can be used based on our storage and data retrieval requirements.

Chapter 4, Read and Write – Behind the Scenes, has been written keeping in mind how the reader can understand core concepts of a system. We'll discuss the operations that Cassandra performs for every read and write query along with all the data structures and caches it uses. We'll also discuss what configuration options it provides to configure the trade-off between consistency and latency. In the later parts of this chapter, we'll see how we can trace a Cassandra read/write query to debug performance issues for our read/write queries.

Chapter 5, Writing Your Cassandra Client, provides some code samples to set up your cluster, learn the core concepts of Cassandra, and create your database and schema. Now comes the time to know how our application will connect to the Cassandra cluster and perform a read/write operation.

Chapter 6, Monitoring and Tuning a Cassandra Cluster, covers various tools that can be used to monitor your Cassandra cluster. After you set up your application and cluster, it is necessary to know how to monitor your Cassandra cluster in order to run it successfully consistently. We'll also discuss various tuning parameters that are used to fine-tune Cassandra with regards to our hardware or networking environments.

Chapter 7, Backup and Restore, talks about Cassandra being highly available with no single point of failure. Sometimes there could be a scenario when we would need to restore data from an old snapshot; for example; suppose some buggy client corrupted our data and we want to recover from last day's snapshot. For situations like this, Cassandra has an option to take a backup of data and use various restore techniques. You'll learn about these techniques in this chapter.