Setting up the Cassandra cluster

Cassandra is a very scalable key-value store. It promises eventual consistency and its distributed ring-based architecture eliminates any single point of failure in the cluster, thus making it highly available. It's designed and developed to support very fast reads and writes over excessively large volumes of data .This fast write and read ability makes it a very strong contender to be used in an online transaction processing (OLTP) application to support large business intelligence systems.

Cassandra provides a column-family-based data model that is more flexible than typical key-value systems.

Installing Cassandra

Cassandra requires the most stable version of Java 1.6 that you can deploy, preferably the Oracle or Sun JVM. Perform the following steps to install Cassandra:

1. Download the most recent stable release (version 1.1.6 at the time of writing) from the Apache Cassandra site.

2. Create a Cassandra directory under /usr/local as follows:

   sudo mkdir /usr/local...