Learning Apache Cassandra

Preface

The crop of distributed databases that has come to the market in recent years appeals to application developers for several reasons. Their storage capacity is nearly limitless, bounded only by the number of machines you can afford to spin up. Masterless replication makes them resilient to adverse events, handling even a complete machine failure without any noticeable effect on the applications that rely on them. Log-structured storage engines allow these databases to handle high-volume write loads without blinking an eye.

But compared to traditional relational databases, not to mention newer document stores, distributed databases are typically feature-poor and inconvenient to work with. Read and write functionality is frequently confined ...