What is Cassandra

Apache Cassandra is highly scalable, high performance, distributed NoSQL database. Cassandra is designed to handle huge amount of data across many commodity servers, providing high availability without a single point of failure.

Cassandra has a distributed architecture which is capable to handle a huge amount of data. Data is placed on different machines with more than one replication factor to attain a high availability without a single point of failure.

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Cassandra is a NoSQL database

NoSQL database is Non-relational database. It is also called Not Only SQL. It is a database that provides a mechanism to store and retrieve data other than the tabular relations used in relational databases. These databases are schema-free, support easy replication, have simple API, eventually consistent, and can handle huge amounts of data.

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Reasons behind its popularity

Cassandra is an Apache product. It is an open source, distributed and decentralized/distributed storage system (database). It is used to manage very large amounts of structured data spread out across the world. It provides high availability with no single point of failure.

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Most important points of Cassandra:

• Cassandra is a column-oriented database.
• Cassandra is scalable, consistent, and fault-tolerant.
• Cassandra's distribution design is based on Amazon's Dynamo and its data model on Google's Bigtable.
• Cassandra is created at Facebook. It is totally different from relational database management systems.
• Cassandra follows a Dynamo-style replication model with no single point of failure, but adds a more powerful "column family" data model.
• Cassandra is being used by some of the biggest companies like Facebook, Twitter, Cisco, Rackspace, ebay, Twitter, Netflix, and more.