Vijay Parthasarathy - Learning Cassandra for Administrators

Vijay Parthasarathy is an Apache Cassandra Committer who has helped multiple companies use Cassandra successfully; most notably, he was instrumental in Netflix's move into Cassandra. Vijay has multiple years of experience in software engineering and managing large project teams. He has also successfully architected, designed, and developed multiple large-scale distributed computing systems, distributed databases, and highly concurrent systems.

I want to thank my wife, Narmadhadevi, and the rest of my family, who supported and encouraged me in spite of all the time it took me away from them.

Robert E. McFrazier is an open source developer, manager, trainer, and architect. Having started with web development, he was able to progress in his career in multiple roles including developer, trainer, build/release engineer, architect, and manager. He has been working primarily in PHP web development, but he also has experience in Java development, AWS cloud, message queues, Hadoop, Cassandra, and creating high-volume SOAP/REST API services.

Robert has worked for many software companies including Nordstrom.com, InfoSpace, Clear, RealNetworks, and Arise Virtual Solutions.

I'd like to thank my wife, Toni, and my son, Robbie, for being the inspiration to continue learning and growing.

Brian O'Neill likes to describe himself as a father, husband, hacker, hiker, kayaker, fisherman, Big Data believer, innovator, and a distributed computing dreamer.

Brian has been a technology leader for over 15 years. He has experience as an architect in a wide variety of settings, from startups to Fortune 500 companies. He believes in open source and contributes to numerous projects. He leads projects that extend Cassandra and integrate the database with full-text indexing engines, distributed processing frameworks, and analytics engines. He won the InfoWorld's Technology Leadership award in 2013. He has authored the Dzone reference card on Cassandra and was nominated as a DataStax Cassandra MVP in 2012.

In the past, Brian has contributed to expert groups within the Java Community Process (JCP), and he has patents in artificial intelligence and context-based discovery. Brian is proud to hold a B.S. in C.S. from Brown University.

Presently, Brian is the Chief Architect at Health Market Science (HMS), where he heads the development of their Big Data platform focused on data management and analysis for the Healthcare space. The platform is powered by Storm and Cassandra and delivers real-time data management and analytics as a service.

Brian is currently co-authoring a book scheduled to be published in December 2013, Storm Blueprints for Distributed Computing , Packt Publishing .

To my wife Lisa, it is in your sail's angelic wake that I find balance

You lift me up and keep me from capsizing. I love you

And to the silverback, for keeping my feet firmly on the ground

While the greyback let me dream among the clouds

To my sons, you are my inspiration, the wind at my back

The stars wait for you.

Without all of you, this ink would never have met this page.

Ricardo J. S. Teixeira is a Portuguese computer engineer.

He currently lives with his family in Vila do Conde, a quiet city by the Atlantic ocean. He is interested in how Big Data technologies can be used to solve common business problems.

Ricardo reviewed this book while he was writing a thesis for his Master's degree on leveraging Big Data technologies (such as Storm and Cassandra) to acquire near real-time metrics for a large retail store chain.

I would like to thank my parents, my brother, Milai, and urea for all the times they waited patiently while I was hunched over my laptop.