Creating Cassandra is two love stories about the same man and woman set eight hundred years apart. The story begins in the 1990s as the Boston based author is seeking and ultimately finds his model for the Cassandra of his twelfth-century novella about a man and woman who will share their names in that other age. Both his muse and the character she inspires are ambitious women. Both marry powerful men who will die leaving them and their not necessarily legitimate fortunes vulnerable. And each will call upon her centurys version of a knight, mercenary or gangster to hold on to what otherwise would be lost. The obsessions that drive the superstitious author and his determined Cassandra influence what will come to pass in the novella, just as what the author ascribes to his twelfth-century characters influences the actions of his Cassandra and the author himself. When the two worlds meet, there are ample warnings of danger but as you would expect in the case of a Cassandra, no warning or prophesy is heeded. Neither the author nor Cassandra would ever have anticipated the price that they had to pay for the worlds they had fought so hard to create in either century. What they created would forever change the course of their lives. From Creating Cassandra Giangreco slowly put his arm around Cassandra. He held her tightly as he said Anyone who writes a biography that is supposed to tell all is a fool, a liar or a person who has not lived much of a life. You know that, Cassandra. Think of your own life. And I would not want you to be any different than how you are.

Imagine what you could do if scalability wasn't a problem. With this hands-on guide, you’ll learn how the Cassandra database management system handles hundreds of terabytes of data while remaining highly available across multiple data centers. This expanded second edition—updated for Cassandra 3.0—provides the technical details and practical examples you need to put this database to work in a production environment. Authors Jeff Carpenter and Eben Hewitt demonstrate the advantages of Cassandra’s non-relational design, with special attention to data modeling. If you’re a developer, DBA, or application architect looking to solve a database scaling issue or future-proof your application, this guide helps you harness Cassandra’s speed and flexibility. Understand Cassandra’s distributed and decentralized structure Use the Cassandra Query Language (CQL) and cqlsh—the CQL shell Create a working data model and compare it with an equivalent relational model Develop sample applications using client drivers for languages including Java, Python, and Node.js Explore cluster topology and learn how nodes exchange data Maintain a high level of performance in your cluster Deploy Cassandra on site, in the Cloud, or with Docker Integrate Cassandra with Spark, Hadoop, Elasticsearch, Solr, and Lucene

Unleash the Power of Distributed Database for Scalable and High-Performance Applications Are you ready to explore the world of distributed databases and unlock the potential of Apache Cassandra? "Mastering Apache Cassandra" is your comprehensive guide to understanding and harnessing the capabilities of Cassandra for building scalable and high-performance applications. Whether you're a database administrator seeking to optimize performance or a developer aiming to create resilient data-driven solutions, this book equips you with the knowledge and tools to master the art of Cassandra database management. Key Features: 1. Deep Dive into Cassandra: Immerse yourself in the core principles of Apache Cassandra, understanding its architecture, data model, and distributed nature. Build a solid foundation that empowers you to manage data effectively in distributed environments. 2. Installation and Configuration: Master the art of installing and configuring Cassandra on various platforms. Learn about cluster setup, node communication, and replication strategies for fault tolerance. 3. Cassandra Query Language (CQL): Uncover the power of CQL for interacting with Cassandra databases. Explore data definition, manipulation, and querying using CQL's intuitive syntax. 4. Data Modeling: Delve into effective data modeling for Cassandra. Learn about tables, primary keys, composite keys, and denormalization strategies to optimize data retrieval and storage. 5. Distributed Data Management: Discover techniques for managing distributed data effectively. Explore concepts like consistency levels, replication factor, and data partitioning for maintaining data integrity. 6. Performance Tuning and Optimization: Explore strategies for optimizing Cassandra performance. Learn about compaction, read and write paths, caching, and tuning settings to achieve low-latency responses. 7. High Availability and Failover: Master the art of ensuring high availability in Cassandra clusters. Learn about replication strategies, data repair, and handling node failures to maintain continuous data access. 8. Security and Authentication: Explore security features and best practices in Cassandra. Learn how to implement authentication, authorization, and encryption to protect your data. 9. Batch Processing and Analytics: Uncover strategies for performing batch processing and analytics with Cassandra. Learn how to integrate with tools like Apache Spark and execute complex queries. 10. Real-World Applications: Gain insights into real-world use cases of Cassandra across industries. From e-commerce to finance, explore how organizations are leveraging Cassandra's capabilities for innovation. Who This Book Is For: "Mastering Apache Cassandra" is an indispensable resource for database administrators, developers, and IT professionals who want to excel in managing Cassandra databases. Whether you're new to Cassandra or seeking advanced techniques, this book will guide you through the intricacies and empower you to harness the full potential of distributed data management.

What story would Eve have told about picking the apple? Why is Pandora blamed for opening the box? And what about the fate of Cassandra who was blessed with knowing the future but cursed so that no one believed her? What if women had been the storytellers? Elizabeth Lesser believes that if women’s voices had been equally heard and respected throughout history, humankind would have followed different hero myths and guiding stories—stories that value caretaking, champion compassion, and elevate communication over vengeance and violence. Cassandra Speaks is about the stories we tell and how those stories become the culture. It’s about the stories we still blindly cling to, and the ones that cling to us: the origin tales, the guiding myths, the religious parables, the literature and films and fairy tales passed down through the centuries about women and men, power and war, sex and love, and the values we live by. Stories written mostly by men with lessons and laws for all of humanity. We have outgrown so many of them, and still they endure. This book is about what happens when women are the storytellers too—when we speak from our authentic voices, when we flex our values, when we become protagonists in the tales we tell about what it means to be human. Lesser has walked two main paths in her life—the spiritual path and the feminist one—paths that sometimes cross but sometimes feel at cross-purposes. Cassandra Speaks is her extraordinary merging of the two. The bestselling author of Broken Open and Marrow, Lesser is a beloved spiritual writer, as well as a leading feminist thinker. In this book she gives equal voice to the cool water of her meditative self and the fire of her feminist self. With her trademark gifts of both humor and insight, she offers a vision that transcends the either/or ideologies on both sides of the gender debate. Brilliantly structured into three distinct parts, Part One explores how history is carried forward through the stories a culture tells and values, and what we can do to balance the scales. Part Two looks at women and power and expands what it means to be courageous, daring, and strong. And Part Three offers “A Toolbox for Inner Strength.” Lesser argues that change in the culture starts with inner change, and that no one—woman or man—is immune to the corrupting influence of power. She provides inner tools to help us be both strong-willed and kind-hearted. Cassandra Speaks is a beautifully balanced synthesis of storytelling, memoir, and cultural observation. Women, men and all people will find themselves in the pages of this book, and will come away strengthened, opened, and ready to work together to create a better world for all people.

Constructing Cassandra analyzes the intelligence failures at the CIA that resulted in four key strategic surprises experienced by the US: the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, the Iranian revolution of 1978, the collapse of the USSR in 1991, and the 9/11 terrorist attacks—surprises still play out today in U.S. policy. Although there has been no shortage of studies exploring how intelligence failures can happen, none of them have been able to provide a unified understanding of the phenomenon. To correct that omission, this book brings culture and identity to the foreground to present a unified model of strategic surprise; one that focuses on the internal make-up the CIA, and takes seriously those Cassandras who offered warnings, but were ignored. This systematic exploration of the sources of the CIA's intelligence failures points to ways to prevent future strategic surprises.

Beginning Apache Cassandra Development introduces you to one of the most robust and best-performing NoSQL database platforms on the planet. Apache Cassandra is a document database following the JSON document model. It is specifically designed to manage large amounts of data across many commodity servers without there being any single point of failure. This design approach makes Apache Cassandra a robust and easy-to-implement platform when high availability is needed. Apache Cassandra can be used by developers in Java, PHP, Python, and JavaScript—the primary and most commonly used languages. In Beginning Apache Cassandra Development, author and Cassandra expert Vivek Mishra takes you through using Apache Cassandra from each of these primary languages. Mishra also covers the Cassandra Query Language (CQL), the Apache Cassandra analog to SQL. You'll learn to develop applications sourcing data from Cassandra, query that data, and deliver it at speed to your application's users. Cassandra is one of the leading NoSQL databases, meaning you get unparalleled throughput and performance without the sort of processing overhead that comes with traditional proprietary databases. Beginning Apache Cassandra Development will therefore help you create applications that generate search results quickly, stand up to high levels of demand, scale as your user base grows, ensure operational simplicity, and—not least—provide delightful user experiences.

Achieve scalability and high availability without compromising on performance About This Book See how to get 100 percent uptime with your Cassandra applications using this easy-follow guide Learn how to avoid common and not-so-common mistakes while working with Cassandra using this highly practical guide Get familiar with the intricacies of working with Cassandra for high availability in your work environment with this go-to-guide Who This Book Is For If you are a developer or DevOps engineer who has basic familiarity with Cassandra and you want to become an expert at creating highly available, fault tolerant systems using Cassandra, this book is for you. What You Will Learn Understand how the core architecture of Cassandra enables highly available applications Use replication and tunable consistency levels to balance consistency, availability, and performance Set up multiple data centers to enable failover, load balancing, and geographic distribution Add capacity to your cluster with zero downtime Take advantage of high availability features in the native driver Create data models that scale well and maximize availability Understand common anti-patterns so you can avoid them Keep your system working well even during failure scenarios In Detail Apache Cassandra is a massively scalable, peer-to-peer database designed for 100 percent uptime, with deployments in the tens of thousands of nodes, all supporting petabytes of data. This book offers a practical insight into building highly available, real-world applications using Apache Cassandra. The book starts with the fundamentals, helping you to understand how Apache Cassandra's architecture allows it to achieve 100 percent uptime when other systems struggle to do so. You'll get an excellent understanding of data distribution, replication, and Cassandra's highly tunable consistency model. Then we take an in-depth look at Cassandra's robust support for multiple data centers, and you'll see how to scale out a cluster. Next, the book explores the domain of application design, with chapters discussing the native driver and data modeling. Lastly, you'll find out how to steer clear of common anti-patterns and take advantage of Cassandra's ability to fail gracefully. Style and approach This practical guide will get you implementing Cassandra right from the design to creating highly available systems. Through a systematic, step-by-step approach, you will learn different aspects of building highly available Cassandra applications and all this with the help of easy-to-follow examples, tips, and tricks.