Preface

Cassandra is a fantastic data store and is certainly well suited as the foundation for a highly available system. In fact, it was built for such a purpose: to handle Facebook's messaging service. However, it hasn't always been so easy to use, with its early Thrift interface and unfamiliar data model causing many potential users to pause—and in many cases for a good reason.

Fortunately, Cassandra has matured substantially over the last few years. I used to advise people to use Cassandra only if nothing else would do the job because the learning curve for it was quite high. However, the introduction of newer features such as CQL and vnodes has changed the game entirely.

What once appeared complex and overly daunting now comes across as deceptively ...

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