Apache Cassandra

Apache Cassandra is a free, open source NoSQL database designed to manage very large data sets (think petabytes) across large clusters of commodity servers. Among many distinguishing features, Cassandra excels at scaling writes as well as reads, and its "master-less" architecture makes creating and expanding clusters relatively straightforward. Cassandra's impressive hierarchy of caching mechanisms and carefully orchestrated disk I/O ensures speed and data safety. Its storage architecture is similar to a log-structured merge tree: Write operations are sent first to a persistent commit log (ensuring a durable write), then to a write-back cache called a memtable. When the memtable fills, it is flushed to an SSTable (sorted string table) on disk. All disk writes are appends -- large sequential writes, not random writes -- and therefore very efficient. A Cassandra cluster is organized as a ring, and it uses a partitioning strategy to distribute data evenly. The preferred partitioner is the RandomPartitioner, which generates a 128-bit consistent hash to determine data placement. The partitioner is assisted by another component called a "snitch," which maps between a node's IP address and its physical location in a rack or data center. When Cassandra writes data, that data is written to multiple nodes so that it remains available in the event of node failure. The nodes to which a given data element is written are called "replica nodes." Cassandra uses the snitch to ensure that the replica nodes for any particular piece of information are not in the same rack. Cassandra's support for replicating across multiple datacenters is best-in-class, providing lower latency for users and the peace of mind of knowing that you can survive regional outages.