Course Overview

Welcome to the course! In this enlightening journey, you'll explore the intricacies of Apache Cassandra. This course aims to take you from a novice to a skilled Cassandra developer.  

Target audience

This course is designed for beginners with no prior experience in Apache Cassandra or NoSQL databases. However, the content is structured to benefit developers with some familiarity in NoSQL who are looking to deepen their knowledge of Cassandra’s features. Whether you're passionate about databases, a software developer, or an IT professional aiming to broaden your expertise, this course is designed to take you from a beginner to a proficient Cassandra developer, unlocking the full potential of this NoSQL database along the way.

Prerequisites

Since this is a beginner-level course, only basic knowledge of databases is required. Familiarity with SQL is a plus.

Course structure

This is a hands-on course, and you are encouraged to actively follow along with the lessons. We will explore Cassandra database concepts through the lens of an online educational platform where instructors offer courses on various subjects.

The course provides a comprehensive exploration of Apache Cassandra, focusing on three key aspects: its distributed architecture, data modeling process, and the Cassandra Query Language (CQL).

Lessons include theoretical foundation followed by practical experience, allowing you to execute prewritten scripts and custom CQL queries on a three-node Cassandra cluster directly in your browser, with no setup required.

Finally, quizzes at the end of each section will help assess your understanding of the concepts, identify knowledge gaps, and provide immediate feedback on your progress.

Learning outcomes

In this course, you will:

• Explore the technological advancements that led to Cassandra’s development and examine the features that make it a leading NoSQL database.

• Learn how Cassandra’s distributed peer-to-peer, leaderless architecture ensures high availability and fault tolerance through data partitioning for distribution and replication for durability and accessibility.

• Understand the goals and steps of Cassandra’s data modeling process, and how it contrasts with the traditional relational database approach.

• Master CQL DDL operations to create, alter, describe, drop, and truncate tables, and CQL DML operations to select, insert, update, and delete data, with syntax and best practices.

• Understand the significance and usage of primary keys, exploring partition keys and clustering columns and their roles in efficient data organization and querying.

• Grasp the use cases for secondary indexes and learn the CQL DDL commands to create and delete them.

• Examine the different data types, including native types, collections, user-defined types, and tuples, to effectively model and store data.

• Explore Cassandra’s tunable consistency and how various consistency levels influence the accuracy, availability, and latency of database operations.

• Delve into Cassandra’s read and write paths, highlighting how the internal storage structures support low-latency operations at scale.

So, without further ado, let’s get started.