Cassandra Developer Center

2011 saw Cassandra conferences with hundreds of attendees in San Fransisco, Tokyo, and New York. Here are my favorite talks of the year.

Best (English) full-length talks

• How do I Cassandra? by Rick Branson. The best (and by far the most original) introduction to Cassandra of the year, given at the Memphis Python User Group. Rick gave this talk his first day of working for DataStax.
• Cassandra 1.0 and the future of big data, my keynote from Cassandra Tokyo. Covers the relationship between NoSQL and Big Data, between Cassandra and Hadoop, and DataStax Enterprise. My Q&A with the audience is also available in English and Japanese.
• Replacing Datacenter Oracle with Global Apache Cassandra on AWS, by Adrian Cockroft from Cassandra SF. Covers Netflix’s migration to Cassandra, after first trying Amazon’s SimpleDB; video is here. Adrian’s blog post on scaling Cassandra to over one million writes per second is also worth checking out.
• From 100s to 100s of Millions, by Erik Onnen from Cassandra SF. Erik explains Urban Airship’s experience with PostgreSQL, MongoDB, and Cassandra; video is here.
• Cassandra 101 for system administrators, by Nathan Milford at Cassandra NYC. A good introduction to Cassandra from a sysadmin perspective, informed by Nathan’s experience with Cassandra in production at Outbrain. Video is here.
• CQL: SQL for Cassandra, by Eric Evans at Cassandra NYC. Eric explains the status and future of CQL, the Cassandra Query Language. If you tried Cassandra back in the day but ran away in terror because of the Thrift-based API, this is a must-see talk. Video is here.

Best lightning talk

Cassandra SF featured lightning talks, five minute presentations that are often as entertaining as they are informative. Matt Dennis‘ talk on Cassandra antipatterns (video) was a great way to end the conference.

Non-English talks

Besides the full conferences linked above, there were some good introductions to Cassandra presented at NoSQL meetups in French, Portuguese, and Japanese. (Incidently, of those three talks, DataStax hired the author of one and tried to hire another — the third already worked for us. It’s a good way to get noticed!)

Coming up next

We’re planning more great Cassandra conferences in 2012. Follow @DataStax on Twitter to make sure you don’t miss them!