Abstract: Cassandra is a new kind of database: it is more than a single-machine system. It naturally runs in a High-Availability configuration. All nodes in the system are symmetric; there is no single point of failure. As you add machines, failure becomes routine, and Cassandra is built to tolerate that with no interruptions. Cassandra is linearly scalable with good performance characteristics for very small and very large data stores. Unlike earlier efforts, Cassandra is more than just a key-value store; it is a structured data store which can facilitate complex use cases and queries. Cassandra allows for random access to your data organized into rows and columns. Cassandra is different, and exciting. This presentation will discuss the pros and cons of using Cassandra, and why it has seen such amazing adoption in the past year. Bio: Ben Coverston is Director of Operations at DataStax (formerly knows as Riptano), a provider of software, support, services, training, resources and help for Cassandra. He has been involved in enterprise software his entire career. Working in the airline industry, he helped to build some of the highest volume online booking sites in the world. He saw first hand the consequences of trying to solve real world scalability problems at the limit of what traditional relational databases are capable of.