Cassandra Summit Europe 2013

From the microsecond your request hits an Apache Cassandra node there are many code paths, threads and machines involved in storing or fetching your data. This talk will step through the common operations and highlight the code responsible. 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. This talk will step through read and write requests, automatic processes and manual maintenance tasks. I'll discuss the general approach to solving the problem and drill down to the code responsible for implementation. Existing Cassandra users, those wanting to contribute to the project and people interested in Dynamo based systems will all benefit from this tour of the code base.