Cassandra is a fast distributed database.
It has several defining features:
- Built in high availability. – Any node can handle read and write requests and your data is replicated to x nodes so regardless of which node (or even a data center) goes down, you will still have access to read and write your data.
- Linear Scalability. – Doubling the number of (identical) nodes should double the write performance. Its basically as simple as that was all nodes can handle all operations and there is no central control.
- Predictable performance. (i.e. doubling the number of identical nodes should double the write throughput)
- no single point of failure. -nodes can go down and come back up without the front end application becoming aware of it.
- Multiple Data Centres catered for and taken advantage of out as standard.
- Built to run on commodity hardware – so you can run it on lots of $1000 servers rather than 1 or 2 $100000 servers.
- Easy to manage operationally. – The system is designed to need very little ops input.
