Book excerpt: "Eric and Russell were early adopters of Cassandra at SimpleReach. In Practical Cassandra, you benefit from their experience in the trenches administering Cassandra, developing against it, and building one of the first CQL drivers. If you are deploying Cassandra soon, or you inherited a Cassandra cluster to tend, spend some time with the deployment, performance tuning, and maintenance chapters... If you are new to Cassandra, I highly recommend the chapters on data modeling and CQL." -From the Foreword by Jonathon Ellis, Apache Cassandra Chair Build and Deploy Massively Scalable, Super-fast Data Management Applications with Apache Cassandra Practical Cassandra is the first hands-on developer's guide to building Cassandra systems and applications that deliver breakthrough speed, scalability, reliability, and performance. Fully up to date, it reflects the latest versions of Cassandra-including Cassandra Query Language (CQL), which dramatically lowers the learning curve for Cassandra developers. Pioneering Cassandra developers and Datastax MVPs Russell Bradberry and Eric Lubow walk you through every step of building a real production application that can store enormous amounts of structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data. Drawing on their exceptional expertise, Bradberry and Lubow share practical insights into issues ranging from querying to deployment, management, maintenance, monitoring, and troubleshooting. The authors cover key issues, from architecture to migration, and guide you through crucial decisions about configuration and data modeling. They provide tested sample code, detailed explanations of how Cassandra works "under the covers," and new case studies from three cutting-edge users: Ooyala, Hailo, and eBay. Coverage includes Understanding Cassandra's approach, architecture, key concepts, and primary use cases- and why it's so blazingly fast Getting Cassandra up and running on single nodes and large clusters Applying the new design patterns, philosophies, and features that make Cassandra such a powerful data store Leveraging CQL to simplify your transition from SQL-based RDBMSes Deploying and provisioning through the cloud or on bare-metal hardware Choosing the right configuration options for each type of workload Tweaking Cassandra to get maximum performance from your hardware, OS, and JVM Mastering Cassandra's essential tools for maintenance and monitoring Efficiently solving the most common problems with Cassandra deployment, operation, and application development