Technical Insights

KillrAnswers Status Update, and Introducing Frank Dux

In a previous post, I introduced a new project, KillrAnswers. I had originally planned on writing KillrAnswers using Rust, leveraging the Cap’n Proto library for RPC and object serialization. …

UselessDB

I have built a completely useless database.

I had a couple flights across the country this week so I decided to test some ideas in Rust. If you’re not yet familiar with Rust, it’s a …

RAMP Made Easy - Part 2

Introduction

In my previous post I introduced RAMP, a family of algorithms for managing atomicity on reads across distributed database partitions. The first algorithm discussed was RAMP-Fast, which …

RAMP Made Easy

Introduction

In this post I’ll introduce RAMP, a family of algorithms for performing atomic reads across partitions when working with distributed databases. The original paper, Scalable Atomic …

Introducing KillrAnswers

The last few months have been a non stop whirlwind of traveling and speaking. I’ve been very fortunate to have spoken at Strata New York, give a couple sessions at the Cassandra Summit, and …

Migrating from MySQL to Cassandra Using Spark

MySQL is a popular choice for new projects. It’s a flexible database that’s easy to set up and start querying. There’s loads of documentation, examples and frameworks it works …

Cassandra + PySpark DataFrames revisted

A little while back I wrote a post on working with DataFrames from PySpark, using Cassandra as a data source. DataFrames are, in my opinion, a fantastic, flexible api that makes Spark roughly 14 …

Joining DataFrames with Pandas

In this post I’ll walk through the process of reading in various plain text database files using Pandas, and then joining together the different DataFrames. All my work was done through an …

You're Already Eventually Consistent

New people to Apache Cassandra are often concerned about the phrase “eventual consistency.” It’s one of those things that seems so foreign, especially if you’re coming from a …