The BrightGauge Blog

What We Learned At DataStax Tech Day

Written by Brian Dosal | July 22, 2014

We recently attended the DataStax Tech Days for Apache Cassandra at the JW Marriott here in Miami.  The seminar was hosted by Rob Murphy, Solutions Engineer at DataStax.  If you are not familiar with DataStax they provide big data solutions using Apache Cassandra along with other technologies to some of the leading tech companies in the world.

Cassandra, is an open source NoSQL database system that was originally created by Facebook back in 2008.  At BrightGauge, we use Cassandra as one of our backend database solutions.  Though we are very happy with what Cassandra provides us today, we wanted to learn about how to take more advantage of its feature sets.  So far Cassandra has not required much maintenance and has worked out of the box as advertised. For this reason, we went to this session to figure out what else we can throw at it!

Rob Murphy gave an introduction to Cassandra. He gave a high level overview of how Cassandra works, how it differs from a traditional RDBMS and its tunable consistency feature.  One of the biggest hurdles when using Cassandra, is understanding the data model for storing and retrieving data.  Rob did a great job of using real world examples to show how data should be modeled for efficiency in Cassandra. We also got to take a look at some of the software DataStax has created to work with Cassandra. Their OpsCenter and DevCenter applications, make interacting with and managing Cassandra a breeze.  This was followed by a tour of the DataStax Enterprise feature set, which was quite impressive.

Robbie Strickland, Software Development Manager at the Weather Channel, then presented examples of how Cassandra solves a lot of the data problems that they encounter on a massive scale. The Weather Channel pulls in vast amounts of data from a variety of different sources  (puts our data requirements in perspective). They have used Cassandra in very creative ways. For instance, they are currently using it as a cache instead of the “out of the box” memcache which he said has drastically increased the speed that they can get their data into their users hands. The Weather Channel also leverages Cassandra’s tunable writes to handle floods of location data inserts. They receive constant updates from the 100M users that are currently using their mobile apps. The insights he shared opened our minds to the continuing possibilities of using the technology in different aspects of our software.

The day session was fantastic and confirmed some base assumptions we’ve made and tested thus far in our architecture.  And ultimately, Cassandra is one less headache within an advanced technology stack that we have at BrightGauge.  That, and Cassandra’s speed, makes this database solution the most attractive NoSQL solution for our small team!!

Thanks DataStax for the session!