Cassandra is a one stop choice for data driven organizations dealing with real-time Big Data operations for their core functionalities. Now what makes it so dear to the developers and organizations dealing huge databases is a bunch of features that it houses to tackle the stored data.

Key features of Cassandra include its

Distributed structure

High performance

Post relational database

Highly scalable structure

It’s a real time data store, which basically stores data on a distributed resource.

Big Data refers to dealing with really large sets of data. For example, 20 Petabytes which is the data handled by Google per day; 1.5 Petabytes which is the size of the 10 billion photos on Facebook; Some of the basic needs of large scale databases include quick data scan over large databases, availability, uptime and capability to control data duplication and backup.

An effective solution to handle large data sets could be Cassandra which is a combo of Google Big table and Amazon Dynamo.

Some interesting must-knows about Cassandra are as follows:

1. The distributed nature of the architecture makes Cassandra hardware failure resistant. At times of such failure, the data can be recovered from other distributed nodes. The user can always choose the amount of data duplication and hence any hardware failure can be faced without fear of losing data.

2. There are no master nodes. All nodes act and work at the same level, appearing as one stable system ready to be scaled or stressed.

3. Cassandra Architecture partitions the data across all the nodes in a cluster and data can be managed individually on each node. It allows read and write anywhere on any node taking care of redundancy.

4. To avoid lag or data conflicts, Cassandra exchanges information over the cluster at regular intervals and keeps all the nodes in sync. A simple mechanism is followed to avoid any redundancy or unnecessary duplication. First the changes go to commit log where all the changes are logged in queue and then go to ‘mem table’ and finally to the disk into an ‘S table’.

5. It allows easy linear scalability.

6. There is no single point of failure hence it is not possible to even sometimes notice that a hardware problem has occurred.

7. One of the biggest features that make Cassandra a favorite to any developer is that it requires no special cache servers to run.

Several user friendly and cost effective features make Cassandra an effective database solution for modern day applications and use case scenarios. Source