Cassandra Day Chicago 2015

This is a crash course introduction to Cassandra. You'll step away understanding how it's possible to to utilize this distributed database to achieve high availability across multiple data centers, scale out as your needs grow, and not be woken up at 3am just because a server failed. We'll cover the basics of data modeling with CQL, and understand how that data is stored on disk. We'll wrap things up by setting up Cassandra locally, so bring your laptops.

So you’re a JVM developer, you understand Cassandra’s architecture, and you’re on your way to knowing its data model well enough to build descriptive data models that perform well. What you need now is to know the Java Driver.

What seems like an inconsequential library that proxies your application’s queries to your Cassandra cluster is actually a sophisticated piece of code that solves a lot of problems for you that early Cassandra developers had to code by hand. Come to this session to see features you might be missing and examples of how to use the Java driver in real applications.

Ready to build something with Cassandra but don't want to use something heavy like Java or C#? Let's take a quick tour though the DataStax Ruby and NodeJS drivers. You'll see how they are easy to use and just as powerful as any other driver. Connect, insert, query like a pro and if there is a server failure? No problem. I'll show you how these drivers keep your app online despite server failures. This is a quick talk, but we'll have plenty of time to make you productive. It's that easy!

Relational systems have always been built on the premise of modeling relationships. As you will see, static schema, one-to-one, many-to-many still have a place in Cassandra. From the familiar, we’ll go into the specific differences in Cassandra and tricks to make your application fast and resilient.

This sessions covers diagnosing and solving common problems encountered in production, using performance profiling tools. We’ll also give a crash course to basic JVM garbage collection tuning. Attendees will leave with a better understanding of what they should look for when they encounter problems with their in-production Cassandra cluster.  This talk is intended for people with a general understanding of Cassandra, but it not required to have experience running it in production.

You’ve heard the talks, followed the tutorials, and done the research.  You are a font of Cassandra knowledge.  Now it’s time to change the world! (Or at least build something to make your boss happy).  In this talk we’ll walk through the process of building KillrVideo, an open source video sharing website where users can upload and share videos, rate them, comment on them, and more.  By looking at a real application, we’ll talk about architectural decisions, how the application drives the data model, some pro tips when using the DataStax drivers, and some lessons learned from mistakes made along the way.  You’ll leave this session ready to start building your next application (world-changing or otherwise) with Cassandra.

TBA