The good news is that we’ve got both bases covered in the executive track of our upcoming Cassandra Summit. This is new for us this year and is happening for a very important reason: you asked for it! At last year’s Summit, we fielded numerous requests for a track dedicated to the business side of NoSQL technology, and I guarantee that what we have in store for you at this year’s event won’t disappoint.

The fact that Cassandra has gone mainstream can be seen in the speaker lineup that makes up this year’s Summit. In the executive track, we have a great set of tech execs who will be telling you both why they chose NoSQL and how they successfully implemented it in their organization.

Although all the talks look great, I thought I’d call out three of the ones I won’t be missing:

1. Taking Risks Without Risking Your Career, Christos Kalantzis, Netflix. Netflix was just christened as the biggest cloud application in the world. Netflix also stores 95% of their data on Cassandra today, making the switch from Oracle a few years ago. How does a smart IT exec safely go from tried-and-true, but old-and-won’t-do to new technology that can both transform how a company does business and save a significant sum of money in the process? Few have the kind of success and tell the story better than Christos and Netflix, so who better to learn from?
2. Stop Crippling Your Business: Fundamental Considerations Everyone Needs to Know, Vincent Dell’Anno, Accenture; John Whittaker, Dell. Few execs know how to evade the perils of not creating proper NoSQL standards and how to avoid the unnecessary red tape that can bog down IT projects better than the guys from Accenture and Dell.
3. It’s like your parents: Relational and NoSQL can co-exist, Sean Knapp, Ooyala. Having a co-existence strategy for new and legacy technology is key when it comes to implementing something like NoSQL: use the right tech in the right place at the right time. When you distribute video content for the likes of ESPN and Rolling Stone, plus take in and analyze literally ¼ of all the video views on the Internet like Ooyala does, you learn a thing or two about how to smartly put the right puzzle pieces together so relational and non-relational play nice.

Of course, there are other great exec talks from Splunk, Cowen, Jaspersoft, and more that will help you answer both the “Why?” and “How do I?” questions that IT leaders are asking about NoSQL. Check out the full schedule and make plans to be at this year’s Summit, which will be here before you know it. Register now and save 25% with the promo code SFSummit25.

See you there!

I’ve been to a lot of conferences in my 20+ years in the database industry, and I cannot remember one that had a more impressive lineup of speakers, including: Accenture, Barracuda Networks, Blue Mountain Capital, Comcast, Constant Contact, Dell, eBay, Fusion-io, Intuit, Microsoft, Netflix, Sony, Splunk, Spotify, Walmart, and many more, all at one event to share their Cassandra experience.

And for the first time, we’ve created an “Executive Track” that will deal specifically with business and personal/career implications associated with implementing a new technology.

The audience will be diverse (developers, architects, DBAs, executives), the topics will be meaningful, and the talk will be straight.  We would love to have you there!  You can register here and use the code SFSummit25 for a 25% discount!

But the eWeek article demonstrates that the same concerns exist where Hadoop implementations are concerned. The article says: “It [Hadoop] was not written to support hardened security, compliance, encryption, policy enablement and risk management.”

Because DSE is a single integrated platform that includes Apache Cassandra for online application use cases, Solr for enterprise search, and Hadoop for batch analytics, we wanted to make sure we had the security bases covered in our platform for each technology. The good news for Hadoop users is that many of the security concerns called out by eWeek are handled in DSE.

For example, eWeek says, “Hadoop also doesn’t support encryption on nodes or on data in transit between nodes”. That’s not true in DSE. Because we use Cassandra for storage vs. HDFS, the transparent data encryption we offer in DSE applies to Hadoop data. Moreover, DSE also supplies client-to-node and node-to-node encryption of data for Hadoop as well as Cassandra and Solr.

eWeek also states, “The distributed nature of Hadoop clusters also renders many traditional backup and recovery methods and policies ineffective. Companies using Hadoop need to replicate, back up and store data in a separate, secured environment.” In the same vein, they state later: “Traditional data security technologies have been built on the concept of protecting a single physical entity (like a database or server), not the uniquely distributed big data computing environments characterized by Hadoop clusters. Traditional security technologies are not effective in this type of distributed, large-scale environment.”

One of the nice things about the Hadoop component of DSE is that automatic redundancy and replication is built in to the platform itself, so all of the goodness of Cassandra – which is architected specifically for distributed, large-scale environments – is inherited on the Hadoop (and Solr) side. This equates into Hadoop data being easily replicated in one location or many; across one datacenter or multiple centers; across one cloud availability zone or several zones. Further, it means no single point of failure or write bottleneck as data can be written to and read in any location.

Backups aren’t hard either as all data is stored in Cassandra column families / tables, so typical snapshot backups and recovery tasks are uniform across a cluster.

So if you’re interested in easily integrating Hadoop batch analytics with your modern line-of-business applications and want to ensure both are secured, you should give DSE 3.0 a try. Download DSE, which is completely free to use without restrictions in development environments (note that production deployments do require a software subscription) and see how it can satisfy both your big data needs and your requirements for security.

Netflix delivers more than one billion video instances each month to its subscribers, and it does so with an architecture that expects failure and is designed from the ground up to handle it.  And what database does the largest cloud app on the planet use to power its media business and keep things running no matter what happens?

Apache Cassandra from DataStax.

ZDNet’s article describes Netflix’s architecture from a high level perspective, but to understand what Netflix does in more detail, you can view Adrian Cockcroft’s (director of architecture for Netflix) presentation from our last conference. In addition, you should review their benchmark tests in the cloud that demonstrate the linear scalability of Cassandra (also see End Point’s benchmarks that compare Cassandra to MongoDB and HBase in the cloud).

Whether it’s performance or continuous availability, Cassandra gives Netflix what it needs. As an example of the latter where database uptime is concerned, when Amazon experienced its much publicized outage last October, Cassandra helped Netflix to never miss a beat: “We configure all our clusters to use a replication factor of three, with each replica located in a different Availability Zone.  This allowed Cassandra to handle the outage remarkably well.  When a single zone became unavailable, we didn’t need to do anything.  Cassandra routed requests around the unavailable zone and when it recovered, the ring was repaired.”

So if you’re wondering if DataStax can tackle an application you’re considering for the cloud, you don’t have to look any further than Netflix for your answer. To understand how DataStax and Apache Cassandra can handle your cloud needs, download our cloud white paper and see the short video below.

Maybe it’s because I’ve been a database geek for so long and have always appreciated advice on where not to step when it comes to trying shiny new technology. Or, maybe it’s because I handled so many database software reviews for magazines in the past that I know one size never fits all, and that the claims trumpeted by software vendors about their technology making all your dreams come true just isn’t legit.

For these reasons and more, whenever I get a chance to talk to a group made up of both business and tech folks, I always try and tell them what I’d want to be told – and that equates to telling them why they may not need the software I’m representing.

This brings me to NoSQL. By all standards of measure, the NoSQL market is booming. Some reports have the NoSQL market growing at an average of 60% per year.  Such information naturally causes IT professionals to wonder if they’re missing something by not implementing NoSQL technology in their environments.

Maybe they are, but maybe they’re not. The $64,000 question is: how do you know?

Having been on the RDBMS side of the fence for so long, and having worked with and watched DataStax customers smartly implement NoSQL technology that actually makes a difference, I think I have a pretty good handle on the why’s and why not’s of NoSQL.

I’d like to invite you to join me for an upcoming webinar I’ve entitled “How to Tell if Your Business Needs NoSQL” where I’ll go over a series of questions that will help you determine whether you can benefit from NoSQL.

No fairies. No pixie dust. No magic. Just some honest scoop that will help you get your head around whether you can use NoSQL right now or not, with clear examples from real customers that demonstrate when NoSQL is actually needed.

DataStax has quickly expanded over the past two years, growing from 26 employees and 27 customers at the end of 2011 to approaching 100 employees and 270+ customers by the end of 2012 along with many thousands of organizations and individuals working with open source Cassandra.

We had some fun with the press this week and they seemed to like the story…

With a strong base of customers in the EMEA region combined with the exceptional demand from the Cassandra community the opening of an EMEA subsidiary headquartered in London to support this demand was a natural next step.

We have also seen strong interest from system integrators, solution providers and consultants in the region and working with this partner ecosystem is a key component of our go-to-market and customer services plan.

Here are some things you can do immediately if you have an interest in Cassandra.

• Cassandra groups have been established in all major cities and you should sign up to the one nearest to you at www.meetup.com. You are going to get a chance to network with your peers and learn how Cassandra can help you with the data driven solutions you are looking to deploy yourself or at one of your customers.
• If you would like to talk directly to the DataStax EMEA team about our commercial offering called DataStax Enterprise, its broad set of features and 24×7 support, please contact us at customersevices@datastax.com.
• If you are a system integrator, consulting firm or solution provider and would like to deliver DataStax Enterprise and Cassandra services and solutions please email the EMEA team at emea-info@datastax.com.
• Certification training will soon to be available in the EMEA region and if you would like to register your interest please also email training@datastax.com.
• We are always on the look out for talent and if you would like to enquire about career opportunities within the EMEA team please send an email to jobs@datastax.com.

It is exciting to see so many established enterprises and young start-ups in the region already relying on Cassandra and DataStax Enterprise for their mission critical data driven applications and services and we look forward to being able to now work closely with them as they continue their journey in this new data driven world.

DataStax: Guys, thanks for making the time to talk with us today. Can you give us a quick overview of Datafiniti?

Datafiniti:  Datafiniti is a search engine for data.  We’ve built a catalog of all structured data available on the Web; things like businesses, people, products, and more.  We keep a massive database built on DSE of all this information that can be searched and used to generate custom output that meets our customer’s inputs and criteria.

We were originally focused on Web crawling technologies at a different company for about three years and then we pivoted that into our new company, which is Datafiniti.  Our customers subscribe to our service and pay us based on the amount of data they receive from us.

DataStax: How do you technically make all that happen?

Datafiniti:  There are two major components to our stack. One is the crawling infrastructure and the other is the search part, all of which is hosted in our data center. Where the crawling part is concerned, we have a number of servers that connect to volunteer computers all over the world that help collect our data for us.

Our search component makes use of DataStax Enterprise with Cassandra and Solr, with an API that sits on top of that for customers to query our database.

DataStax: Did you guys start out using NoSQL for your database or transition from an RDBMS?

Datafiniti:  We didn’t consider relational technology, but started out by looking at all the various NoSQL options like HBase and search software like Elasticsearch.  We ended up deciding on Cassandra for its non-centralized approach and easy scaling. Cassandra allows us to store the big amounts of data that we need to consume and manage.

What was missing in Cassandra was the Google-type search functionality that we needed. When we saw that DataStax had integrated Solr with Cassandra in DataStax Enterprise, it was just a natural evolution for us to use it as our database.

Also, when we tested Solr in DataStax Enterprise, we saw that it worked and performed better than open source Solr, which was also a win for us.

DataStax: Did anything else come into play with your decision making process?

Datafiniti:  At the time, manageability was something important to us – we wanted a database that would be easy to install, manage, and grow. DataStax Enterprise was just the best option for what we do and need.

We also looked at various benchmarks and saw that Cassandra ran faster than the other options we were considering.

DataStax: What are the some of the business benefits you’ve experienced with DataStax Enterprise?

Datafiniti:  The primary benefit is that we’re able to deliver much faster search operations to our customers with DSE, and as everyone knows, customers don’t like to wait long when it comes to searching for what they want.

DataStax: What advice what you give to people who are just starting out with NoSQL and/or DataStax Enterprise?

Datafiniti:  Pay close attention to the demos and samples that ship with DSE because they will help you quickly get things set up and understand how things work. Also, make sure you understand how the individual components of DSE – Cassandra, Hadoop, and Solr – work independently of each other.

Lastly, it’s good to know up front how you go from Cassandra, which has a very flexible and fluid schema model to one that’s more restrictive like Solr.

DataStax: Guys, thanks for the time.

Datafiniti:  You bet.

For more information on Datafiniti, please visit: http://datafiniti.net/.

DataStax: We’re doing this interview live at our Cassandra New York Big Data event. Stephen, what are your impressions of the show so far?

Stephen:  It’s been great. I’ve gotten to meet with a lot of unique representatives from some major brands like eBay and others. I’ve learned a lot from the folks over on the front lines working with Cassandra directly and I’ve had a chance to send some ideas across and get some very helpful feedback.

DataStax: What does see.me do?

Stephen:  See.me is an online community for creatives. So whether you’re a photographer, model, musician or designer you can join our community and support other creative, be supportive and pretty soon earn money from your passions.

DataStax: So let’s talk a little about Cassandra, I understand you have a MySQL background; why the switch?

Stephen:  At see.me we’re being proactive about the needs of our users and future user base, which is growing. Right now we’re about around 700,000 users and growing a few thousand a day. We foresee that MySQL can’t handle our data ingestion needs and it also doesn’t address things like search and analytics.

But I would say the biggest motivator for the switch is that Cassandra scales readily and is designed for scale. We need it for resilience, stability and to handle the growth.

DataStax: You mentioned search and analytics, so I understand you’re interested in Datastax Enterprise and just doing some research and getting to grips with it. What are some of the features that you find attractive in that platform?

Stephen:  For Cassandra itself, I initially did the research for a different company years back and I was interested in the scalability and performance for reads and writes. Specifically, with DataStax Enterprise, I’d say that we really love the idea of an out-of-the-box solution that combines, without ETL, Cassandra for storage, Solr for search (which we’re already using with MySQL to great effect), and also Hadoop for analytics. And we have work to do on designing our algorithms and getting smarter for not just matching up creators, but also with images and aesthetics. Bringing this all together, being a small business without a big budget, we can do a lot for our users with DSE.

DataStax: What advice do you have to pass on to people who come from a relational background and are getting started with NoSQL and DataStax Enterprise?

Stephen:  I would say take advantage of the fact that Cassandra has, from very early on, been very open sourced and community engaged.  There are lots of resources including webinars and videos that convey to you, faster than reading the manual in some cases, how you can use this to get up and running quickly and that was important to me.  Participating in a webinar allowed me to understand not just which version of Cassandra was right for my company, but which version of Cassandra I needed to sell to my teammates to make the transition from MySQL and to really sell the importance/impact of it for people who are not on the front lines of data.

DataStax: Steve, thank you very much for taking a few minutes today at NYC* Big Data Tech Day to talk to us. Enjoy the rest of the show and we look forward to having your participation in the community moving forward!

Stephen:  Thanks!

For more information on see.me, visit: http://www.see.me/

Tools are Cool

When I first began to work heavily in database, everything was command line driven. Then, the first set of graphical tools for databases began to appear, which were immediately scoffed at by most hard-core database pro’s.

Over time, though, the tools (which were bad to begin with) got a lot better and began to win converts, including me. I wrote some of my own graphical database monitoring software that was bought by a database tools company and spent six years there creating admin, data modeling, development, and performance tools for a lot of different databases. So, needless to say, I’m definitely a proponent of using good DB tools.

Today, while you still have folks who are command-line only, the vast majority of database pro’s are happy to use tools software if they get the job done.

A key component of our DataStax Enterprise Edition is OpsCenter, which is our visual big data management solution. With version 3.0 of OpsCenter, we’ve delivered some great new features that I know you’ll be interested in because they help reduce the time it takes to tackle many common administration tasks. Let me briefly walk through each with you.

Enterprise Provisioning

Apache Cassandra got a lot of knocks a few years back for being hard to install and get going. If anyone today tells you that’s still true, they’re just wrong mainly for two reasons: (1) They likely haven’t seen all the improvements made in Cassandra that make it much more simple to install and run; (2) They haven’t downloaded and used OpsCenter 3.0.

Version 3.0 of OpsCenter has full visual support for creating new Cassandra / Hadoop / Solr database clusters either on premise or in the cloud. Plus, you can now handle a lot more admin tasks visually than you could in the past: adding nodes, starting and stopping nodes, editing config files, doing rolling restarts, etc.

For more info on 3.0’s new provisioning features, see my other blog post on our dev blog that showcases these items in more depth.

Visual Restore with Object Level Reach

I think it’s fair to say that, outside of a major software upgrade, nothing strikes fear into the hearts of DB admins more than a critical database restore. When the pressure is on, systems are down, nothing tests whether your deodorant works or not more than this. Add to that the complexity of a database running across many machines and datacenters and things just get tougher.

That’s why, in OpsCenter 3.0, we added visual restore capabilities that work with our visual backup functionality that was added back in version 2.0. Now, you can point and click your way through a complex restore with confidence because OpsCenter does all the heavy lifting for you.

Plus, OpsCenter’s restore provides for object-level recovery. Why is this important? Let’s say you have a 10TB database cluster and you drop a critical table or delete some key rows in a column family. The last thing you want to do is be forced to do a full 10TB restore just to get back one object or rows in a table. With OpsCenter’s restore interface, you can just bring back selected objects vs. the whole database, which is definitely a time saver.

Custom Backup Management

One thing we added to OpsCenter’s backup functionality in 3.0 is the ability to customize what happens before and after a backup runs. This lets you do things like send backup files off to a cloud storage provider for safekeeping and more.

Software Update Notifications

With OpsCenter 3.0, you don’t have to wonder if you’re on the latest software release of any DataStax software. OpsCenter visually notifies you of any updates to DataStax Enterprise server, OpsCenter, and Apache Cassandra, so you’ll never be behind.

Diagnostic Collections

If a cluster begins to slow down or if problems seem to be developing, oftentimes admins need help in knowing what logs and statistics to look at to understand what’s happening underneath the covers. OpsCenter 3.0 helps in this regard by providing one button that an admin can click that collects all relevant logs and diagnostics into a single package that can be downloaded and reviewed or sent off to DataStax support for quick analysis.

And More…

OpsCenter 3.0 includes more enhancements such as writing metadata to non-monitored clusters, better visual object creation and management, new alerts, and more.

For More Information

To try out OpsCenter 3.0’s new management features, download a copy today. DataStax Enterprise Edition w/ OpsCenter Enterprise is completely free to use in development environments with no restrictions, however production deployments do require that a subscription be purchased.

For more information on how to use the new OpsCenter features, please see our online documentation, our “What’s New in DataStax 3.0?” white paper, as well as some tech blog posts that I and the OpsCenter team have written, which are coming in our DataStax dev blog.