What could you do with data if scalability wasn't a problem? With this hands-on guide, you'll learn how Apache Cassandra handles hundreds of terabytes of data while remaining highly available across multiple data centers -- capabilities that have attracted Facebook, Twitter, and other data-intensive companies. Cassandra: The Definitive Guide provides the technical details and practical examples you need to assess this database management system and put it to work in a production environment.

Author Eben Hewitt demonstrates the advantages of Cassandra's nonrelational design, and pays special attention to data modeling. If you're a developer, DBA, application architect, or manager looking to solve a database scaling issue or future-proof your application, this guide shows you how to harness Cassandra's speed and flexibility.

• Understand the tenets of Cassandra's column-oriented structure
• Learn how to write, update, and read Cassandra data
• Discover how to add or remove nodes from the cluster as your application requires
• Examine a working application that translates from a relational model to Cassandra's data model
• Use examples for writing clients in Java, Python, and C#
• Use the JMX interface to monitor a cluster's usage, memory patterns, and more
• Tune memory settings, data storage, and caching for better performance