Apache Cassandra is a highly scalable distributed NoSQL database that provides high availability and fault tolerance with its masterless architecture, making it a preferred choice for big data applications.
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Apache Cassandra is a highly scalable, distributed NoSQL database management system designed to handle large amounts of data across many commodity servers, providing high availability with no single point of failure. Originally developed at Facebook to power their inbox search feature, Cassandra was released as an open-source project in 2008 and later became a top-level Apache project.<br><br>Cassandra's architecture is based on a ring topology where data is distributed among all nodes in the cluster. It implements a masterless, peer-to-peer design where all nodes are equal, eliminating bottlenecks and ensuring fault tolerance. The system uses consistent hashing to distribute data across the cluster and supports tunable consistency levels, allowing developers to balance between data consistency and availability according to application requirements.<br><br>Key features of Cassandra include:<br><br>1. Linear scalability - Performance increases linearly as new machines are added<br>2. Decentralized - No single point of failure with symmetric nodes<br>3. Tunable consistency - Flexible trade-offs between consistency and availability<br>4. Flexible data model - Support for both structured and unstructured data<br>5. High write throughput - Optimized for write-heavy workloads<br>6. Geographic distribution - Multi-datacenter replication for global deployments<br><br>Cassandra uses its own query language called CQL (Cassandra Query Language), which resembles SQL but is adapted for its data model. The data model consists of keyspaces (similar to databases), tables, and rows organized in a column-family structure.<br><br>In Big Data ecosystems, Cassandra often serves as the operational database that handles real-time data needs, complementing analytical systems like Hadoop. It's particularly well-suited for time-series data, product catalogs, messaging platforms, and IoT applications requiring high throughput and low latency at scale.<br><br>Companies like Netflix, Apple, Instagram, and Spotify rely on Cassandra to manage their massive data workloads.Apache Cassandra is a highly scalable, distributed NoSQL database management system designed to handle large amounts of data across many commodity servers, providing high availability with no single point of failure. Originally developed at Facebook to power their inbox search feature, Cassandra wa…