This is a summary of the original Cassandra white paper, available at this link.
Abstract
Casandra, in short:
- Is based on the concept of distributed storage, having no single point of failure.
- Manages a huge amount of structured data stored across cost-efficient commodity servers without sacrificing writing throughput and read efficiency.
- Doesn’t support a full relational data model.
- The data model provides a user with dynamic control over data layout and format.
Introduction:
Facebook designed Casandra to:
- Fulfill reliability and scalability requirements of the ever-growing system.
- Address storage requirements of the Inbox Search Problem. Launched in June 2008, it allowed users to search through their Facebook inbox