April Meetup - Apache Cassandra

The April meetup will be all about the Apache Cassandra database (http://cassandra.apache.org/), the right choice when you need scalability and high availability without compromising performance.

First Aaron Morton, Cassandra Committer and DataStax MVP for Cassandra, will present an overview of how Cassandra works as well as diving into the new features.
In this talk Aaron will examine Cassandra’s architecture and its strengths for powering mission-critical applications. He will introduce core concepts such as Cassandra’s data model, multi-datacenter replication, and tunable consistency. As well as new features in Cassandra version 1.2 including virtual nodes, CQL 3 language and query tracing.

After that Drew Broadley will show us how to get started with Apache Cassandra from installation using the DataStax Community version (Ubuntu apt package), getting DataStax OpsCenter going, and how to get PHP to connect with Cassandra using the PHPCassa Class Library and PHP Thrift Extension and then various PAPERKUT examples (including distributed counters).

Pizza & beer will be sponsored by iwantmyname (https://iwantmyname.co.nz/) again!

-----
Aaron Morton:
Aaron Morton is a Freelance Developer based in New Zealand, and a Committer on the Apache Cassandra project. In 2010 he gave up the RDBMS world for the scale and reliability of Cassandra. He now spends his time advancing the Cassandra project and helping others get the best out of it.
Drew Broadley:
Drew is the founder of PAPERKUT (established 2010), where the passion for this venture grew from a personal gripe and realising this gripe spreads across countries and cultures.
Drew brings the technical aspect to PAPERKUT and after many iterations of databases from MySQL, to MongoDB, finally settling on Cassandra the data layer to PAPERKUT's API platform that provides receipt and payment data layer, the volatile cache layer, real-time analytics layer and eventually a Hadoop setup for others to off-load their analytics work.