Apache Cassandra / Cassandra Community Webinar Series

Apache Cassandra is the leading distributed database in use at thousands of sites with the world’s most demanding scalability and availability requirements. Apache Spark is a distributed data analytics computing framework that has gained a lot of traction in processing large amounts of data in an efficient and user-friendly manner. The joining of both provides a powerful combination of real-time data collection with analytics. After a brief overview of Cassandra and Spark, this class will dive into various aspects of the integration.

Tired of timeouts? Cursing your cursors? Join the distributed revolution and bring your dev team into application nirvana. You won’t believe how easy it is to be code complete on your next big project. We will show you how to lead your devs away from the clutches of the DBA and be in control of their own data destiny. DIscover the methodology that will make your Cassandra project epic.

Third normal form? That’s so 20th century. Learn the newest techniques to make your Cassandra database sing from the rafters in performance and scalability. AND it uses concepts that you already know and apply every day. You can do this. This is the must-see half hour of your professional life! These developers found a new way to work with databases. First you will be shocked, then you will be inspired!

Oracle is a database. So is Cassandra. And that’s about it as far as how they are similar. How they are different though… well, that’s when things get good. Have you tried to scale your Oracle database to handle 1M simultaneous users (without ruining your mental health and close personal relationships)? How about creating 100% uptime with active-active datacenters? You don’t even want to think about it, do you? Spend some time with us to learn how Cassandra can make you into the database rockstar you know you are.

With a growing customer base and Cassandra clusters running on-top of a number of the world’s largest cloud and bare-metal hosting providers, Instaclustr is at the forefront of always-on Cassandra hosting. Instaclustr leverages the power of Docker, a modern containerization solution for Linux, and CoreOS, a lightweight Linux distribution tailored to running software inside containers, to build a stable and adaptable Cassandra hosting platform.

Being able to rapidly iterate on, build, and test your code is key to being a productive developer. Without local automation, working with the numerous platforms and technologies in your stack can become very frustrating.

In this webinar, Ben Bromhead CTO of Instaclustr will explore best practices to easily integrate Apache CassandraTM into your development workflow, so you spend more time writing good code and less time fighting your environment.

Attend to learn:
- How to setup a local Cassandra environment (single and multi-node)
- How to run multiple versions of Cassandra
- How to integrate Cassandra into your local build and test process
- The development tools best suited to work directly with Cassandra

You wouldn't try and use a saw to hammer a nail so why do people try to use databases as queues? Or perhaps more subtly, rely on atomic updates to mutable data distributed across the world (when you say it out loud is sounds a bit ridiculous right?).

Misusing technology isn't isolated to the distributed database world. I used to work on a small piece of queueing software called WebSphereMQ and what do you know? A good portion of our customers used it as a database!
In this talk we're going to go through the most common misuses of Apache Cassandra and why they’re not a good idea.
Topics we'll cover:
• Joins
• Mutable data / read then write / breaking the laws of physics
• Really wide rows
• Batches
• Multi partition queries
• Secondary indexes under the covers
• Tripping over tombstones
• Crazy retry policies

Libon is a messaging service designed to improve mobile communications through free calls, chat and a voicemail services regardless of operator or Internet access provider. As a mobile communications application, Libon processes billions of messages and calls while backing up billions of contact data. Join this webinar to learn best practices and pitfalls to avoid when tackling a migration project from Relational Database (RDBMS) to Cassandra and how Libon is now able to ingest massive volumes of high velocity data with read and write latency below 10 milliseconds.

This session 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. Viewers will leave with a better understanding of what they should look for when they encounter problems with their in-production Cassandra cluster.

Did you know there are some things you should doing when writing your data driven application using Apache Cassandra? Let’s talk about that. There are features in almost every driver that will keep your application online and running fast. You should know what they are. Even if you know these features, I’m going to tell why they work and why they’re a good idea. This will not be language specific; I will be using multiple languages and drivers. This talk should appeal to programmers in general.

FINN.no is the leading classifieds website in Norway and the country's busiest website. At FINN.no fraud is a real, ongoing, constantly changing problem that continuously requires a lot of resources. Plus, fraud is an area of development that's not frequently discussed. Mick will go through various challenges, ideas, and thoughts about where and why Cassandra is the best choice when working with machine learning.

Would you like to learn how to use Cassandra but don't know where to begin? Want to get your feet wet but you're lost in the desert? Longing for a cluster when you don't even know how to set up a node? Then look no further! Rebecca Mills, Junior Evangelist at Datastax, will guide you in the webinar "Getting Started with Apache Cassandra..."

You'll get an overview of Planet Cassandra's resources to get you started quickly and easily. Rebecca will take you down the path that's right for you, whether you are a developer or administrator. Join if you are interested in getting Cassandra up and working in the way that suits you best.

With the new Python driver for Cassandra it is easy to build integrations and apps that use Cassandra seamlessly as a back in. This session will explore what it takes to build the app and the features available with the new Python drivers.

Eventual Consistency != Hopeful Consistency
Speaker: Christos Kalantzis, Engineering Manager, Netflix

This session will address Cassandra's tunable consistency model and cover how developers and companies should adopt a more Optimistic Software Design model.

Starting with Version 1.2 Cassandra has made it easier to store more data on a single node. With off heap data structures, virtual nodes, and improved JBOD support we can now run nodes with several Terabytes of data.

In this talk Aaron Morton, Co-Founder and Principal Consultant at The Last Pickle, will walk through running fat nodes in a Cassandra cluster. He'll review the features that support it and discuss the trade offs that come from storing 1TB+ per node.

'Tis the season to get all of your urgent and demanding Cassandra questions answered live! Get ready for yet another very special edition of the Cassandra Community Webinar -- Q&A style. Please join us as we close out 2013 with an entire hour devoted to answering as many Cassandra questions as possible. Our panel of experts have a vast knowledge of Cassandra and will be answering questions ranging from a variety of personas; developer, architecture and operations.

Slides: http://www.slideshare.net/planetcassandra/cassandra-20-introduction-use-cases-29122759

Abstract
Patrick McFadin (@PatrickMcFadin), Chief Evangelist for Apache Cassandra at DataStax, will be presenting an introduction to Cassandra as a key player in database technologies. Both large and small companies alike chose Apache Cassandra as their database solution and Patrick will be presenting on why they made that choice.

Patrick will also be discussing Cassandra's architecture, including: data modeling, time-series storage and replication strategies, providing a holistic overview of how Cassandra works and the best way to get started.

About Patrick McFadin
Prior to working for DataStax, Patrick was the Chief Architect at Hobsons, an education services company. His responsibilities included ensuring product availability and scaling for all higher education products. Prior to this position, he was the Director of Engineering at Hobsons which he came to after they acquired his company, Link-11 Systems, a software services company. While at Link-11 Systems, he built the first widely popular CRM system for universities, Connect. He obtained a BS in Computer Engineering from Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo and holds the distinction of being the only recipient of a medal (asanyone can find out) for hacking while serving in the US Navy.

We'll be covering some aspects of our architecture, highlighting differences between MongoDB and Cassandra. We'll go in depth to explain why Cassandra is a better choice for our general purpose Application Platform (SHIFT) as well as our Media Buying Analytics tool (the SHIFT Media Manager). We'll be going over common design patterns people might be familiar with coming from a background with MongoDB and highlight how Cassandra would be used as a better alternative. We'll also touch more on cqlengine which is nearing feature completeness as the Cassandra object mapper for Python.

CQL3 is the newly ordained, canonical, and best-practices means of interacting with Cassandra. Indeed, the Apache Cassandra documentation itself declares that the Thrift API as "legacy" and recommends that CQL3 be used instead. But I've heard several people express their concern over the added layer of abstraction. There seems to be an uncertainty about what's really happening inside of Cassandra.

In this presentation we will open up the hood and take a look at exactly how Cassandra is treating CQL3 queries. Our first stop will be the Cassandra data structure itself. We will briefly review the concepts of keyspaces, columnfamilies, rows, and columns. And we will explain where this data structure excels and where it does not. Composite rowkeys and columnnames are heavily used with CQL3, so we'll cover their functionality as well.

We will then turn to CQL3. I will demonstrate the basic CQL syntax and show how it maps to the underlying data structure. We will see that CQL actually serves as a sort of best practices interface to the internal Cassandra data structure. We will take this point further by demonstrating CQL3 collections (set, list, and map) and showing how they are really just a creative use of this same internal data structure.

Attendees will leave with a clear, inside-out understanding of CQL3 and will be able use CQL with a confidence that they are following best-practices.

Presentation on SHIFT's migration from MongoDB to Cassandra. Topics will include reasons behind choosing to move to Cassandra, zero downtime migration strategy, data modeling patterns, and the benefits of using CQL3.

Speakers:
Jon Haddad, Senior Architect at SHIFT
Jon Haddad is the Sr. Architect at SHIFT and is one of the maintainers of cqlengine. Jon has spent the last decade at various startups in the LA area. His previous projects include Answerbag.com and Livestrong.com.

Blake Eggleston, Senior Developer at SHIFT
Blake Eggleston is a Senior Developer at SHIFT. He is one of the authors of CQLengine, the Python CQL3 object mapper, and a member of Tinkerpop, the graph database development group.

The design of Apache Cassandra allows applications to provide constant uptime. Peer-to-Peer technology ensures there are no single points of failure, and the Consistency guarantees allow applications to function correctly while some nodes are down. There is also a wealth of information provided by the JMX API and the system log. All of this means that when things go wrong you have the time, information and platform to resolve them without downtime. This presentation will cover some of the common, and not so common, performance issues, failures and management tasks observed in running clusters. Aaron will discuss how to gather information and how to act on it. Operators, Developers and Managers will all benefit from this exposition of Cassandra in the wild.

Speaker: Aaron Morton, Apache Cassandra Committer
Aaron Morton is a Freelance Developer based in New Zealand, and a Committer on the Apache Cassandra project. In 2010 he gave up the RDBMS world for the scale and reliability of Cassandra. He now spends his time advancing the Cassandra project and helping others get the best out of it.

Apache Cassandra solves many interesting problems to provide a scalable, distributed, fault tolerant database. Cluster wide operations track node membership, direct requests and implement consistency guarantees. At the node level, the Log Structured storage engine provides high performance reads and writes. All of this is implemented in a Java code base that has greatly matured over the past few years.

In this webinar Aaron Morton will step through read and write requests, automatic processes and manual maintenance tasks. He will also discuss the general approach to solving the problem and drill down to the code responsible for implementation.

Speaker: Aaron Morton, Apache Cassandra Committer

Aaron Morton is a Freelance Developer based in New Zealand, and a Committer on the Apache Cassandra project. In 2010 he gave up the RDBMS world for the scale and reliability of Cassandra. He now spends his time advancing the Cassandra project and helping others get the best out of it.

Ooyala has been using Apache Cassandra since version 0.4.Their data ingest volume has exploded since 0.4 and Cassandra has scaled along with it. In this webinar, Al will share lessons that he has learned across an array of topics from an operational perspective including how to manage, tune, and scale Cassandra in a production environment.


Speaker: Al Tobey, Tech Lead, Compute and Data Services at Ooyala

Al Tobey is Tech Lead of the Compute and Data services team at Ooyala. His team develops and operates Ooyala's internal big data platform, consisting of Apache Cassandra, Hadoop, and internally developed tools. When not in front of a computer, Al is a father, husband, and trombonist.

You know you need Cassandra for it's uptime and scaling, but what about that data model? Let's bridge that gap and get you building your game changing app. We'll break down topics like storing objects and indexing for fast retrieval. You will see by understanding a few things about Cassandra internals, you can put your data model in the spotlight. The goal of this talk is to get you comfortable working with data in Cassandra throughout the application lifecycle. What are you waiting for? The cameras are waiting!

A brief intro to how Barracuda Networks uses Cassandra and the ways in which they are replacing their MySQL infrastructure, with Cassandra. This presentation will include the lessons they've learned along the way during this migration.

Speaker: Michael Kjellman, Software Engineer at Barracuda Networks

Michael Kjellman is a Software Engineer, from San Francisco, working at Barracuda Networks. Michael works across multiple products, technologies, and languages. He primarily works on Barracuda's spam infrastructure and web filter classification data.

Sure you can do some time series modeling. Maybe some user profiles. What's going to make you a super modeler? Let's take a look at some great techniques taken from real world applications where we exploit the Cassandra big table model to it's fullest advantage. We'll cover some of the new features in CQL 3 as well as some tried and true methods. In particular, we will look at fast indexing techniques to get data faster at scale. You'll be jet setting through your data like a true super modeler in no time.

Speaker: Patrick McFadin, Principal Solutions Architect at DataStax

Patrick McFadin is a Principle Solutions Architect at DataStax, the commercial company behind Apache Cassandra. Prior to his work at DataStax he was the Chief Architect at Hobsons, an education services company. He obtained a BS in Computer Engineering from Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo and holds the distinction of being the only recipient of a medal (as anyone can find out) for hacking while serving in the US Navy.

Title: Introduction to Apache Cassandra 1.2

Details: Join Aaron Morton, DataStax MVP for Apache Cassandra and learn the basics of the massively scalable NoSQL database. This webinar is will examine C*'s architecture and its strengths for powering mission-critical applications. Aaron will introduce you to core concepts such as Cassandra's data model, multi-datacenter replication, and tunable consistency. He'll also cover new features in Cassandra version 1.2 including virtual nodes, CQL 3 language and query tracing.

Speaker: Aaron Morton, Apache Cassandra Committer

Aaron Morton is a Freelance Developer based in New Zealand, and a Committer on the Apache Cassandra project. In 2010, he gave up the RDBMS world for the scale and reliability of Cassandra. He now spends his time advancing the Cassandra project and helping others get the best out of it.

At Comcast Silicon Valley we have developed a general purpose message bus for the cloud. The service is API compatible with Amazon's SQS/SNS and is built on Cassandra and Redis with the goal of linear horizontal scalability. In this Webinar we will explore the architecture of the system and how we employ Cassandra as a central component to meet key requirements. We will also take a look at the latest performance numbers.

Speaker: Boris Wolf, Senior Software Engineer at Comcast

Boris Wolf has more than ten years experience working for various technology startups in the Bay Area and is currently the engineering lead for the CMB project at Comcast Silicon Valley.

Patrick McFadin discusses what's new in C* 1.2 -- VNodes, Collections and CQL3.

C*ollege Credit is the bi-weekly educational webinar series for all things Apache Cassandra™ (C*) related. Each webinar features an MVP or member from the community that has hands-on experience building the next generation of applications on Apache Cassandra. The series is designed to provide a baseline of education across an array of topics from 'what is NoSQL' to 'how to scale out Apache Cassandra across multiple datacenters'. http://www.datastax.com/resources/webinars/collegecredit

Christos Kalantzis, Engineering Manager of Cloud Persistence Engineering at Netflix, will talk about his transition from a database administrator to a database engineer working with cutting edge big data technology. He will provide expertise and insight into how he learned about new technologies and the use cases he now gets to work on.

Speaker: Brian O'Neill (Lead Architect, Health Market Science)

Cassandra provides facilities to integrate with Hadoop. This is sufficient for distributed batch processing, but doesn't address CEP distributed processing. This webinar will demonstrate use of Cassandra in Storm. Storm provides a data flow and processing layer that can be used to integrate Cassandra with other external persistences mechanisms (e.g. Elastic Search) or calculate dimensional counts for reporting and dashboards. We'll dive into a sample Storm topology that reads and writes from Cassandra using storm-cassandra bolts.

Apache Cassandra Project Chair, Jonathan Ellis, looks at all the great improvements in Cassandra 1.2, including Vnodes, Parallel Leveled Compaction, Collections, Atomic Batches and CQL3.

Speaker | Brian O'Neill (Lead Architect, Health Market Science)
Date | Thursday December 13

Want to gift a cool Java application to Grandma this holiday season? Don't miss this webinar where we'll create a couple from scratch to go along with that potholder you got her. We'll use a couple of the most popular APIs, Hector and Astyanax, to demonstrate how quickly you can get up and running on Cassandra. We'll also delve into a bit of data modeling; specifically, we'll take a look at composite columns and how to get at them in Java.

Speaker | Eric Lubow (CTO, SimpleReach)
Date | Tuesday October 23 @ 8:30AM PST

Join Eric Lubow, CTO of Simple Reach and DataStax MVP for Apache Cassandra as he examines the types of applications that are suited to be built on top of Cassandra. Eric will talk about the key considerations for designing and deploying your application on Apache Cassandra. This webinar is 101 level.

Speaker | Russ Bradberry (Principal Architect, SimpleReach)
Date | Wednesday November 29 @ 11AM PST

Join MVP for Apache Cassandra and Node.js expert, Russ Bradberry as he presents the basics of how to write your first Node.is application on top of Cassandra. Russ will talk about the Node.js driver, Helenus, that he created and provide top tips that will save you time and headaches. This webinar is 101 level

Speaker | Aaron Morton (Apache Cassandra Committer)
Date | Wednesday, October 10 @ 11AM PST

Join Aaron Morton, DataStax MVP for Apache Cassandra and learn the basics of the massively scalable NoSQL database. This webinar is 101 level and will examine C*'s architecture and its strengths for powering mission-critical applications. Aaron will introduce you to concepts such as Cassandra's data model, multi-datacenter replication, and tunable consistency.

Speaker | Billy Bosworth (CEO, DataStax)
Date | Wednesday, September 26 @ 11AM PST

Why are customers choosing to replace or augment their tired, legacy RDBMS' with NoSQL big data platforms at record speed? This 101 level webinar will provide the answer. Join Billy Bosworth, CEO of DataStax, as he examines h ow to assess where NoSQL is right for your business, what factors to consider when selecting a big data platform, how to start planning which business priorities to address first, where you can find more information and why DataStax may be your best new partner to power the app that powers your business.

Speakers | Aaron Morton (Apache Cassandra Committer), Robin Schumacher (VP of Products, DataStax)
Date | Wednesday, September 12 @ 11AM PST

In the first of our bi-weekly C*ollege Credit series Aaron Morton, DataStax MVP for Apache Cassandra and Apache Cassandra committer and Robin Schumacher, VP of product management at DataStax, will take a look back at the history of NoSQL databases and provide a foundation of knowledge for people looking to get started with NoSQL, or just wanting to learn more about this growing trend. You will learn how to know that NoSQL is right for your application, and how to pick a NoSQL database. This webinar is 101 level.