The growing popularity of Apache Cassandra rests on this database's ability to handle very large data sets that include hundreds of terabytes. This hands-on guide provides the details and practical examples you need to understand Cassandra's non-relational database design and how to take advantage of it in a production environment. Author Eben Hewitt (Java SOA Cookbook) pays special attention to data modeling, and demonstrates Cassandra's many advantages, including its high availability, eventual consistency model, and ability to scale easily. If you're a developer with a startup, you'll learn how to future-proof your application by implementing Cassandra before your storage needs become critical. Join Twitter, Cisco, Digg, Reddit, and other data-intensive organizations that have come to rely on Cassandra's NoSQL design. This book shows you how.* Understand the tenets of NoSQL and Cassandra's column-oriented structure * Get best practices for configuring, monitoring, and performance tuning * Learn how to write, update, and read Cassandra data * Discover how Cassandra's distributed design lets you add or remove nodes from the cluster as your application requires * Get examples for writing clients in Java, Python, C#, and Scala * Extend Cassandra by integrating it with the Hadoop framework