Technical Insights

Rustyrazorblade Radio, A Distributed System Podcast

I haven’t blogged in a while, which is a bummer because I was determined to write an article a week for the entire year. I haven’t even come remotely close to that goal.

I’ve …

Working Relationally With Cassandra

I’ve spent the last 4 years working in the big data world with Cassandra because it’s the only practical solution if you have a requirement to scale out, uptime is a priority, and you need …

Cassandra Dataset Manager Preview 1 Released

One of the problems of learning a new database is getting used to a new way of data modeling. PostgreSQL looks different from Redis, which is different from a graph, and is different from Cassandra. …

Cassandra Dataset Manager Video Preview

I posted a short preview showing off some of the work I’ve been doing recently on Cassandra Dataset Manager, a tool to help new Cassandra users learn how to create proper data models. …

Cassandra 3.3 Released

Apache Cassandra 3.3 was released last week. As per the Tick Tock release schedule, this release is focused on bug fixes and no new features were introduced. For practical purposes, consider this a …

Cassandra Secondary Index Preview #1

If you’ve looked into using Cassandra at all, you probably have heard plenty of warnings about its secondary indexes. If you’ve come from a relational background, you may have been …

Async Python and Cassandra with Gevent

Introduction

Building a web app relying on database calls with CPython (the standard Python distribution) is pretty easy, but can suffer from performance problems. Python itself isn’t …

Cassandra 3.2 Overview

The 3.0 release of Apache Cassandra marked an important milestone. One of the biggest updates was CASSANDRA-8099, the JIRA to modernize the storage engine. It was also the first release in the new …

FrankDux RPC Preview #1

In my previous post, I briefly mentioned FrankDux, a new project I’m working on. FrankDux is a framework for quickly building RPC microservices in Python. This is a preview of it’s …