Audience
This Cassandra course is a hybrid course for developers and administration staff. The class is 60% lecture and 40% labs.
Prerequisites
No prior knowledge of databases or programming is assumed, although having some basic experience with relational/SQL databases and Java will help.
Duration
3 days. Hands on.
Course Objectives
This is a fast-paced, vendor agnostic, technical overview of the Cassandra database.
This course is targeted at both technical and non-technical people who want to understand the emerging world of Big Data, with a specific focus on Cassandra. In each sub-topic, the instructor will provide links and resource recommendations for students who want to explore that area further, for example, YouTube videos, books, blog posts. Students will be given a PDF slide deck, which can be used as reference material after the course. PDFs will also be given out for the 5 labs in the course.
At the completion of the course, students will be able to perform the following:
- Identify the correct use cases for Cassandra
- Appreciate the core concepts of the operations side of the Cassandra database
- Dive into the critical architecture paths of Cassandra: Bloom filters, Block Indexes, SSTables
- Access a 3-node Cassandra cluster in Rackspace to perform hands-on labs
- Understand the fundamentals of how to write Java or Python code to interact with Cassandra
- Gain links to the best books, blog posts and videos to learn more about Cassandra on their own
Course Content
Intro to Cassandra
How to pick a NoSQL database
Brief use case discussion of: Key/Value, Key/Document, Column Family, Graph, Real-time
Structured vs. Unstructured data
Cassandra Origins: Amazon Dynamo, Google BigTable and Facebook
So, what's Cassandra good for? Use Cases
Hardware recommendations (Spinning disks vs SSD, CPU/RAM/Network requirements, etc)
Cassandra versions
Cassandra distributions
Book, YouTube & Blog recommendations for learning more about Cassandra