Mythbusting with Apache Cassandra

Jeffrey Carpenter

2019-09-11 15:15 #cassandra

As a mature operational database with a 10+ year history as an Apache project, Cassandra has a long history with many twists and turns. In this talk, we’ll look at common misgivings and misunderstandings that we encounter in conversations with developers and get to the bottom of the story:

• Cassandra is a “columnar” (or “column-oriented”) database.
• Porting my relational data model to Cassandra will work well.
• Cassandra is a niche database that is only good for narrow set of use cases.
• My application can’t tolerate eventual consistency.
• Cassandra counters are unreliable.
• Never use materialized views or secondary indexes in production

Jeffrey Carpenter

Jeff Carpenter is the director of developer advocacy at DataStax, where he leverages his background in system architecture, microservices, and Apache Cassandra to help empower developers and operations engineers to build distributed systems that are scalable, reliable, and secure. Jeff has worked on projects ranging from a complex battle planning system in an austere network environment to a cloud-based hotel reservation system and is the author of the second edition of Cassandra: The Definitive Guide.