Comments about O'Reilly Media Cassandra: The Definitive Guide:

I have been into RDBMS for a long time. Recently I observed a lot of buzz around NoSQL databases. I initially thought them as 'No' SQL databases. A few blogs on the web corrected me : NoSQL stands for "not-only SQL'.

There are lot of NoSQL databases : Cassandra, MemCacheDB, Redis, MongoDB, Hadoop to name a few. Of all these Cassandra sounded a widely adopted database. It is being used in production environment of many famous web2.0 applications , Facebook, Reddit, Digg, Cisco, Twitter and many more. Cassandra is Facebook's own tool that is incubated by Apache as Open-source.

Cassandra - The definitive guide is just the book to get started in NoSQL and Cassandra concepts together. It takes readers from basic to advanced levels building concepts gradually. There are lot of examples throughout the book to illustrate Cassandra features.

The NoSQL database design requires non-relational approach. A little mind-shift is needed if you come from RDBMS background. The author has realized this and has sincerely set seperate sections that talks how both the design approaches vary, what are the design patterns for NoSQL databases and what aspects are to be kept in mind when going schemaless. In fact both approaches are illustrated for the same sample application. More details on non-relational databases are provided in Appendix-A.

Seperate chapters focus on Cassandra's architecture, ways to configure it, monitor and maintain the production environment. These provide in-depth information to system/database administrators looking for quick,practical information to speed up their learning. Also,if you are already aware of Hadoop (or) looking for a way to integerate Hadoop and Cassandra this book can help you.

This is an excellent book for developers and database administrators alike. If your notion is to build highly-scalable db that can make fast-writes and store terabytes of data then Cassandra should be your choice. And to learn Cassandra this should be the book you pick up.

Comments about O'Reilly Media Cassandra: The Definitive Guide:

This book covers a complex topic for me. A developer/designer by trade, I usually work with database managers when I have a site that is data heavy. I read a little about this book and what Cassandra is, and thought I would try to wrap my mind around it, especially since I am always interested in emerging technology. 'Cassandra - The Definitive Guide' delivered. It is definitely a complex topic, but the author, Eben Hewitt, went to great lengths to simplify topics, and explain them in detail. He brings you into the world of Cassandra by first explaining some of the history of data and databases, and believe it or not, made it a very interesting read. There are hands on exercises in the book that are not too difficult to follow, but, I would not recommend them for the novice. I now have a much better understanding of where data in the world of social networking is headed. Thanks Eben.