Showcasing the Power of Apache Cassandra: Four Must-Attend Sessions at Community Over Code
This weekend the Apache Software Foundation’s flagship conference Community Over Code will kick off. The four-day, in-person event will bring the ASF and the broader open source community together in Halifax, Nova Scotia from October 7-10. We’re excited that the Apache Cassandra community will be among the projects represented with four talks included in the event schedule.
These talks highlight some of the key features of the forthcoming 5.0 release and underscore how a powerful tool like Cassandra can be used in IoT workloads:
Adding Vector Search to Apache Cassandra
Speaker: Jonathan Ellis
Saturday, October 7, 2023, 12:10 ADT
Vector search is a hot topic in the world of databases, and Jonathan Ellis, the founder of DataStax and former Apache Cassandra project chair, will shed light on its implementation in Cassandra. This session will explore the fundamentals of k-Nearest Neighbors (kNN) and Approximate Nearest Neighbors (ANN) vector search, introducing the Hierarchical, Navigable Small-World (HNSW) algorithm for vector indexing. You’ll gain insights into the challenges and solutions involved in adapting HNSW to Cassandra, including concurrent updates and queries. Witness the execution of supported queries with the HNSW index and other storage-attached index (SAI) predicates, and learn valuable lessons to enhance performance. As an application developer, understanding Cassandra’s vector search capabilities is crucial in today’s data-driven landscape.
Unified Compaction Strategy in Cassandra (CEP-26)
Speaker: Branimir Lambov
Sunday, October 8, 2023, 12:10 ADT
Cassandra 5.0 is set to revolutionize compaction strategies with CEP-26, offering a unified solution to address existing strategy deficiencies, improve performance, and facilitate easy reconfiguration. In this session, Branimir Lambov, a long-term Cassandra committer, will dive deep into the key features of this strategy and the rationale behind them. Learn how this strategy covers leveled, tiered, and hybrid compaction schemes, employs a flexible SSTable sharding scheme, and selects and prioritizes SSTable sets for compaction based on overlap. Whether you’re dealing with large-scale data or time-series data, CEP-26 has you covered. Discover real-world examples of its impressive performance improvements and the possibilities it unlocks.
IoT Overkill: Running a Cassandra and Kafka cluster on Open Source Hardware
Speaker: Kassian Wren
Sunday, October 8, 2023, 14:20 ADT
Open source hardware meets open source software in this session by Kassian Wren, an Open Source Technology Evangelist. Dive into the world of open source clusters, featuring a unique five-node configuration with Raspberry Pi and Orange Pi nodes. Witness the orchestration of a Docker swarm that runs Cassandra and Kafka services, distributed across worker nodes. This session isn’t just about showcasing the cluster but also delves into automation, setup, and maintenance. If you’re passionate about IoT projects and the intersection of hardware and software, this session promises to be a fascinating journey into the possibilities of open source technology.
Performance Measurement and Tuning of Cassandra 5.0 Transactions on Cloud Infrastructure
Speakers: German Eichberger and Pallavi Iyengar
Tuesday, October 10, 2023, 14:20 ADT
Cassandra 5.0 introduces transaction support based on ACCORD, necessitating new benchmarks for distributed transactional databases. German Eichberger and Pallavi Iyengar from Microsoft’s Azure Managed Instances for Apache Cassandra team will explore this topic in detail. Learn about benchmark scenarios inspired by YCSB+T’s Closed Economy Workload and delve into the challenges of cloud environments. Understand the impact of network topologies, including one-region and multi-region clusters, and discover performance-enhancing techniques like SSD-based write-through cache. Gain insights into tuning Cassandra 5.0 for optimal performance in different scenarios and compare it with previous Cassandra versions.
To see the full Community Over Code schedule, visit https://communityovercode.org/schedule.
To learn more about The ASF’s Community Over Code and register to attend, visit https://communityovercode.org.
