Essential information for understanding and using Cassandra.

Cassandra uses a protocol called gossip to discover location and state information about the other nodes participating in a Cassandra cluster.

How data is distributed and factors influencing replication.

A partitioner determines how data is distributed across the nodes in the cluster (including replicas).

A snitch determines which datacenters and racks nodes belong to.

Client read or write requests can be sent to any node in the cluster because all nodes in Cassandra are peers.

Install using Yum repositories on RHEL, CentOS, and Oracle Linux.

Install using APT repositories on Debian and Ubuntu.

Install on all Linux-based platforms using a binary tarball.

Steps for installing the same version as other nodes in your cluster.

Steps for installing Python 2.7 on older distributions such as CentOS 6.5.

Steps for uninstalling Cassandra by install type.

Installation methods for the supported cloud providers.

Instructions for various platforms.

Recommendations for Linux production environments.

A deployment scenario for a Cassandra cluster with a single datacenter.

A deployment scenario for a Cassandra cluster with multiple datacenters.

Cassandra provides various security features to the open source community.

Topics for using SSL in Cassandra.

Topics for internal authentication.

Topics about internal authorization.

Which ports to open when nodes are protected by a firewall.

The default settings for Cassandra make JMX accessible only from localhost. To enable remote JMX connections, change the LOCAL_JMX setting in cassandra-env.sh.

A description about Cassandra's storage structure and engine.

Cassandra provides fine-grained control of table storage on disk.

Understanding how Casssandra stores data.

A brief description of the write path of an update.

How Cassandra deletes data and why deleted data can reappear.

How hinted handoff works and how it optimizes the cluster.

How reads work and factors affecting them.

A brief description about transactions and concurrency control.

Topics about how up-to-date and synchronized a row of data is on all replicas.

The cassandra.yaml file is the main configuration file for Cassandra.

Using the cassandra.yaml file to configure gossip.

Analyzing the heap dump file can help troubleshoot memory problems.

Configuring the buffered read size can reduce problems with wasted disk I/) and unnecessary garbage collection.

Topics about configuring virtual nodes.

Steps for configuring Cassandra for multiple network interfaces or when using different regions in cloud implementations.

About Cassandra logging functionality using Simple Logging Facade for Java (SLF4J) with a logback backend.

Cassandra provides commit log archiving and point-in-time recovery.

If not using virtual nodes (vnodes), you must calculate tokens for your cluster.

Cassandra support for integrating Hadoop with Cassandra.

Monitoring topics.

Cassandra uses Bloom filters to determine whether an SSTable has data for a particular row.

Data caching topics.

Configuring memtable throughput to improve write performance.

Steps for configuring compaction. The compaction process merges keys, combines columns, evicts tombstones, consolidates SSTables, and creates a new index in the merged SSTable.

Compression maximizes the storage capacity of Cassandra nodes by reducing the volume of data on disk and disk I/O, particularly for read-dominated workloads.

Enabling write survey mode.

Tuning the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) can improve performance or reduce high memory consumption.

Correcting a problem in the gossip state.

Node repair topics.

Topics for adding or removing nodes, datacenters, or clusters.

A brief description of how Cassandra backs up data.

Steps for taking a global snapshot or per node.

Steps to delete snapshot files.

Steps to enable incremental backups. When incremental backups are enabled, Cassandra hard-links each memtable flushed to a SSTable to a backups directory under the keyspace data directory.

Methods for restoring from a snapshot.

Steps for restoring a snapshot by recovering the cluster into another newly created cluster.

Recovering from a single disk failure in a disk array using JBOD.

A command line interface for managing a cluster.

Cassandra start-up parameters can be run from the command line (in Tarball installations) or specified in the cassandra-env.sh file (Package or Tarball installations).

A Java-based stress testing utility for basic benchmarking and load testing a Cassandra cluster.

Tools for using, upgrading, and changing Cassandra SSTables.

Topics for starting and stopping Cassandra.

Install location topics.

Set environment variables (cassandra.in.sh).

Deprecated configuration attributes. Will be removed in Cassandra 3.0.