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Data Architect and DataOps Engineer

Backing Up Cassandra Data

The Apache distribution of Cassandra does not automatically take backups of it’s data. However, it does include a tool to create backups. Backups in Cassandra are called “snapshots”. In the photography sense of the word, a snapshot is a picture of what the data looks like at a moment in time. Since data in Cassandra is immutable, taking a snapshot is quick, painless, and has very little impact on the system.

How To Create a Cassandra Cluster in AWS Part 2

In Part 1 of this brief tutorial, I shared with you how to create a cluster in Amazon’s AWS. In Part 2, we’ll discuss installing and configuring cassandra on your new cluster. Log onto Virtual Machines Now that I have these three machines, how do I log onto them and start to use them. From the EC2 Dashboard, select the Instances tab on the left side. This will give you an overview of all the instances you have running.

How To Create a Cassandra Cluster in AWS Part 1

In this post, I’ll walk you through creating a Cassandra cluster in Amazon’s Web Services. The first thing you’ll need to do is sign in to your Amazon Console. If you don’t have one, create an account. Once you’re logged in, from the dashboard, click on the EC2 logo, under the Compute section. This is Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud where you can launch virtual servers, known as an Amazon EC2 instance.

Cassandra Summit 2015

Imagine if you could create an event that was able to generate over a 4,000% increase in attendance over five years. Well, that’s exactly what DataStax has done with the annual Cassandra Summit in the Bay area. *4,000% increase in attendance* This past week was the 2015 Cassandra Summit, held in Santa Clara, was the largest NoSQL conference in the world. Prior to the start, there were over 6,100 registrations onsite.

Simple Cassandra Instance In AWS EC2

I’ve been doing Cassandra development in an enterprise setting for quite a while now. And being a good little development shop (Expedia), we had Chef set up to deploy stuff for us, including Cassandra installation. Chef is great at doing just that. The downside to that is that you forgot the details of how to install Cassandra manually. Here are the steps to spin up an EC2 instance and getting a single instance of Cassandra running on it.

House Of The Rising Scrum

Yes, I’m having fun with my blog titles twisting classic song titles. Get used to it, I think I’ll keep doing it. Fire Fighting After a couple of weeks at the new job, I noticed that there wasn’t really any direction to how issues were being addressed. It seemed like whatever the current fire was or whoever was pestering the loudest was getting their issue addressed first. This also meant that current issues being worked were being dropped for the latest “emergency” issue.

The Times, They Are A Changing

Wow, it’s been almost three years since I blogged about anything here. I feel just a little bit bad about that, but honestly, it’s been a pretty busy time for me. My last post was about Alternatives to Relational Databases … yep, I’ve definitely been in that world for a while now. Back then, I was just starting to scratch the surface on what NoSQL even was. Looking at that post, now I realize I didn’t know nearly enough on the subject.

Presentation On Alternatives To Relational Databases

Tonight, I’m presenting to a CISQ 250 class at Drury University. The topic of the presentation is “Alternatives to Relational Databases”. The following is my presentation in SlideShare.net: Alternatives to Relational Databases

Sql Presentation Fo Springfield .NET User's Group

Tonight, I gave a presentation to the Springfield .NET Users Group. I chose to present on SQL Server 2008 Development for Programmers. I tried to keep it to a level 200 type class. The following is my presentation in SlideShare.net: SQL Server 2008 Development for Programmers

PCI Training Equals Lessons In How To Hack

Today at work, all developers were required to take an all-day training in PCI. This is the second such session that I’ve attended since I was hired. It’s all very interesting to learn about, however, it really boils down to hacking. They are teaching us all the methods that we (our websites) can be hacked. The surprising part is how much my co-workers already know about how to attack a site.