Using Groovy to access Apache Cassandra

The Apache Cassandra project was started at Facebook in 2007 to offer users a better experience when searching their inbox. The challenges that Facebook engineers had to face was mostly related to massive amount of data, very high throughput, and scalability at a mind-blowing rate.

Cassandra is a distributed column-oriented database designed to manage humongous amounts of structured data in a decentralized, highly scalable way. The absence of a single point of failure makes Cassandra highly available and fault tolerant.

While Cassandra resembles a traditional database and shares some design strategies, it does not support a full relational data model. On the contrary, the Cassandra's data model is flexible, because each row can contain a variable number of columns.

In this recipe, we will go through different aspects of connecting and querying a Cassandra database.

Getting ready

For this recipe, we assume that the reader has already some familiarity with...