Cassandra: How it works and what it's good for!

We are very happy to have DataStax Evangelist Christopher Batey all the way form London with us for this meetup!

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Speaker:
Christopher Batey

Bio:
Christopher Batey (@chbatey) is a Software Engineer by trade and is currently employed by DataStax as a Technical Evangelist for Apache Cassandra, previously he was Senior Software Engineer at BSkyB where he spent his time designing and developing their next generation platform that backs Sky Go, Now TV etc. He is a keen blogger ( http://christopher-batey.blogspot.co.uk/ ), tweeter and open source advocate.

Title:
Cassandra: How it works and what is's good for!

Abstract:
Apache Cassandra is a the database of choice for people who need scalability and high availability without compromising performance. Cassandra's replication achieves fault tolerance and zero down time on commodity hardware.
However to take advantage of a database like Cassandra developers need to get out of a relational mindset, so in this talk we’ll cover:

• Overview of Cassandra including a deep dive into the internals to see how it achieves high throughputs and fault tolerance

• Getting technical: CAP theorem, latency vs consistency and the dynamo paper

• Core Cassandra use cases, with the aim to leave attendees with a good understanding of whether Cassandra is the right choice for their next project

• Interacting with Cassandra from Java with examples that use the raw driver and mapping APIs

• A taster of more complicated topics such as light weight transactions, batches and load balancing

The goal is to have attendees gain an understanding of when Cassandra is the right fit and how it achieves scalability and tolerance to hardware failure all while showing how the modern drivers make it easy to use from a variety of programming languages.