Cassandra and ETAs (Uber)

Cassandra

Cassandra is a distributed database management system, which just means it uses multiple commodity servers to store and manage a large amount of data. A commodity server is like a computer that's specifically designed to run a server program and handle associated tasks.

Thanks to its distributed architecture, Cassandra can handle a ton of data. It stores the data on different machines with more than one replication factor – this ensures high availability and makes sure there's no single point of failure. The data structures Cassandra uses are more specific than those used in traditional relational databases and are faster too. Think of it this way: relational databases are like traveling by bus, while Cassandra is like going by airplane – you get where you need to go faster!