Cassandra – A Decentralized Structured Storage System

Cassandra is a distributed database bringing together Dynamo's fully distributed design and Bigtable's ColumnFamily-based data model. It is highly scalable both in terms of storage volume and request throughput while not being subject to any single point of failure. This paper presents an architectural overview of Cassandra and also discusses how its design is founded in fundamental principles of distributed systems. Some practical applications that use Cassandra are also listed. This paper also presents why Cassandra may not be a good choice for some applications by highlighting its limitations.