Cassandra Administration

• comfortable in Linux environment (navigating command line, editing files with vi / nano)
• For on-site courses, a laptop or desktop with 8 GB of RAM
• For remote courses, a working Cassandra lab will be provided, and nothing is needed except a web browser

This course will introduce Cassandra –  a popular NoSQL database.  It will cover Cassandra principles, architecture and data model.   Students will learn data modeling  in CQL (Cassandra Query Language) in hands-on, interactive labs.  This session also discusses Cassandra internals and some admin topics.

• Section 1: Introduction to Big Data / NoSQL
  • NoSQL overview
  • CAP theorem
  • When is NoSQL appropriate
  • Columnar storage
  • NoSQL ecosystem
• Section 2 : Cassandra Basics
  • Design and architecture
  • Cassandra nodes, clusters, datacenters
  • Keyspaces, tables, rows and columns
  • Partitioning, replication, tokens
  • Quorum and consistency levels
  • Labs : interacting with cassandra using CQLSH
• Section 3: Data Modeling – part 1
  • introduction to CQL
  • CQL Datatypes
  • creating keyspaces & tables
  • Choosing columns and types
  • Choosing primary keys
  • Data layout for rows and columns
  • Time to live (TTL)
  • Querying with CQL
  • CQL updates
  • Collections (list / map / set)
  • Labs : various data modeling exercises using CQL ; experimenting with queries and supported data types
• Section 4: Data Modeling – part 2
  • Creating and using secondary indexes
  • composite keys (partition keys and clustering keys)
  • Time series data
  • Best practices for time series data
  • Counters
  • Lightweight transactions (LWT)
  • Labs : creating and using indexes;  modeling time series data
• Section 5 : Cassandra Internals
  • understand Cassandra design under the hood
  • sstables, memtables, commit log
• Section 6: Administration
  • Hardware selection
  • Cassandra distributions
  • Cassandra Nodes Communication
  • Writing and Reading data to/from the storage engine
  • Data directories
  • Anti-entropy operations
  • Cassandra Compaction
  • Choosing and Implementing compaction strategies
  • Cassandra best practices (compaction, garbage collection,)
  • Creating a test Cassandra instance with low memory footprint
  • Troubleshooting tools and tips
  • Lab : students install Cassandra, run benchmarks