With ever increasing rates of data creation comes the demand to store data as fast and reliably as possible, a demand met by modern databases such as Cassandra. Apache Cassandra is the perfect choice for building fault tolerant and scalable databases. Through this practical guide, you will program pragmatically and understand completely the power of Cassandra. Starting with a brief recap of the basics to get everyone up and running, you will move on to deploy and monitor a production setup, dive under the hood, and optimize and integrate it with other software.You will explore the integration and interaction of Cassandra components, and explore great new features such as CQL3, vnodes, lightweight transactions, and triggers. Finally, by learning Hadoop and Pig, you will be able to analyze your big data.