Introduction

Apache Cassandra is an open source distributed database management system. It is an Apache Software Foundation top-level project designed to handle very large amounts of data spread out across many commodity servers while providing a highly available service with no single point of failure. It is a NoSQL solution that was initially developed by Facebook and powered their Inbox Search feature until late 2010. Jeff Hammerbacher, who led the Facebook Data team at the time, has described Cassandra as a BigTable data model running on an Amazon Dynamo-like infrastructure.

References

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Cassandra
2. http://cassandra.apache.org/