Book excerpt: Build, manage, and configure high-performing, reliable NoSQL database for your applications with Cassandra Key FeaturesWrite programs more efficiently using Cassandra's features with the help of examplesConfigure Cassandra and fine-tune its parameters depending on your needsIntegrate Cassandra database with Apache Spark and build strong data analytics pipelineBook Description With ever-increasing rates of data creation, the demand for storing data fast and reliably becomes a need. Apache Cassandra is the perfect choice for building fault-tolerant and scalable databases. Mastering Apache Cassandra 3.x teaches you how to build and architect your clusters, configure and work with your nodes, and program in a high-throughput environment, helping you understand the power of Cassandra as per the new features. Once you’ve covered a brief recap of the basics, you’ll move on to deploying and monitoring a production setup and optimizing and integrating it with other software. You’ll work with the advanced features of CQL and the new storage engine in order to understand how they function on the server-side. You’ll explore the integration and interaction of Cassandra components, followed by discovering features such as token allocation algorithm, CQL3, vnodes, lightweight transactions, and data modelling in detail. Last but not least you will get to grips with Apache Spark. By the end of this book, you’ll be able to analyse big data, and build and manage high-performance databases for your application. What you will learnWrite programs more efficiently using Cassandra's features more efficientlyExploit the given infrastructure, improve performance, and tweak the Java Virtual Machine (JVM)Use CQL3 in your application in order to simplify working with CassandraConfigure Cassandra and fine-tune its parameters depending on your needsSet up a cluster and learn how to scale itMonitor a Cassandra cluster in different waysUse Apache Spark and other big data processing toolsWho this book is for Mastering Apache Cassandra 3.x is for you if you are a big data administrator, database administrator, architect, or developer who wants to build a high-performing, scalable, and fault-tolerant database. Prior knowledge of core concepts of databases is required.