By now, you are familiar with all the nuts and bolts of Cassandra. We have discussed how the pressure to make data stores to web scale inspired a rather not-so-common database mechanism to come to the mainstream; how CAP theorem governs the behavior of such databases. We have seen that Cassandra shines out among its peers. Then, we dipped our toes into the big picture of Cassandra read and write mechanisms. This left us with lots of fancy terms. Further, we looked into the definition of these words, components that drive Cassandra and their influence on its behavior.
It is understandable that it may be a lot to take in for someone new to NoSQL systems. It is okay if you do not have complete clarity at this point. As you start working with Cassandra, tweaking it, experimenting with it, and going through the Cassandra mailing list discussions or talks, you will start to come across stuff that you have read in this chapter and it will start to make sense, and perhaps you may want to come back and refer to this chapter to improve clarity.
It is not required to understand this chapter fully to be able to write queries, set up clusters, maintain clusters, or do anything else related to Cassandra. A general sense of this chapter will take you far enough to work extremely well with Cassandra-based projects.
How does this knowledge help us in building an application? Isn't it just about learning Thrift or CQL API and get going? You might be wondering why you need to know about compaction and storage mechanism when all you need to do is to deliver an application that has a superfast backend. It is not obvious at this point why we are learning this, but as we move ahead with developing an application, we will come to realize that knowledge about underlying storage mechanism helps. In later chapters, when we will learn about deploying a cluster, performance tuning, maintenance, and integrating with other tools such as Apache Hadoop, you may find this chapter useful. At this point, we are ready to learn some of the common use cases, and how they utilize various features of Cassandra. The next chapter is about knowing how to use Cassandra.