Installing and using Cassandra in just five steps

Ronald Mathies of Sodeso.nl has written an extremely nice tutorial about how to both install and use Cassandra. This series of blog postings walks the users through installation of Cassandra on both Linux and Windows, describes Cassandra's data model (which takes a bit to get your head around) and discusses details about the Thrift client.

Here are the links for the five part series:

Installing and using Apache Cassandra With Java Part 1 (Installation)
Installing and using Apache Cassandra With Java Part 2 (Data model)
Installing and using Apache Cassandra With Java Part 3 (Data model 2)
Installing and using Apache Cassandra With Java Part 4 (Thrift Client)
Installing and using Apache Cassandra With Java Part 5 (Thrift Client 2)

Looking to the future with Cassandra

In the previous post, we spoke about Digg's decision to abandon MySQL in favor of using Apache's Cassandra. Well these types of decisions are not just made on a whim, or at least you hope they are not. The following post, by the Digg Engineering Team, discusses why they looked into non-traditional data store technologies and what problems it is helping them to solve.

Read More: Looking to the future with Cassandra

Understanding the Cassandra Code Base

I've taken a particular interest in the Cassandra data store. Our next author has as well. Ran Tavory, the creator/developer for Hector a Java based client for Cassandra has written a very informative post about understanding the Cassandra Code Base. In his post he discusses the various internals of the Cassandra architecture. It’s a quick but very informative read.

Read More: Understanding Cassandra Code Base

CouchDB: The Definitive Guide

I personally love when I can find free online resources, especially when those resources are e-books. The folks responsible for CouchDB have made available online: CouchDB: The Definitive Guide. This guide walks you through all of the basics from installation through performance tuning. Definitely worth a look.

Introduction to the Cassandra Data Model

One of the most interesting things I find with NoSQL databases is each database’s data model and Apache’s Cassandra is no exception. The following post by Arin Sarkissian is one of the best introductions to Cassandra’s data model that I've seen so far.

Read more: WTF is a SuperColumn? An Intro to the Cassandra Data Model