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#cassandra

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12 articles

Bloom Filters: The Speed Secret of Modern NoSQL Databases

Bloom Filters: Avoiding the Disk Bottleneck In high-performance databases like Cassandra, RocksDB, and BigTable, the biggest performance killer is unnecessary disk I/O. When you query for a key that doesn't exist, the da…

Apr 20, 20262 min read

Deep Dive

#databases#bloom-filters#nosql

DatabasesAdvanced

Cassandra Gotchas: Dealing with Tombstones and Wide Partitions

Cassandra Gotchas: Managing Distributed Scale Cassandra is built for extreme availability, but its "append-only" storage model (LSM-trees) introduces specific behaviors that can catch developers off guard. Here are the m…

Apr 20, 20263 min read

Deep Dive

#cassandra#databases#performance

DatabasesAdvanced

Cassandra Internals: LSM-Trees, Gossip, and Eventual Consistency

Cassandra Internals: Built for Scale Apache Cassandra is a peer-to-peer distributed database designed to handle massive amounts of data across many commodity servers. Its "Masterless" architecture and high write throughp…

Apr 20, 20262 min read

Deep Dive

#cassandra#databases#lsm-trees

DatabasesAdvanced

Cassandra Multi-Region Architecture: Designing for Global Scale

Cassandra Multi-Region: The Blueprint for 99.999% Availability In a global application, serving data from a single region leads to high latency for distant users and a single point of failure for the entire system. Apach…

Apr 20, 20262 min read

Deep Dive

#cassandra#databases#distributed-systems

System DesignAdvanced

Chaos Engineering for Data Infrastructure: Testing Distributed Resilience

Chaos Engineering for Data Infrastructure In a distributed system, "failure" isn't an if, but a when. Chaos Engineering is the discipline of experimenting on a software system in production to build confidence in its cap…

Apr 20, 20262 min read

Deep Dive

#chaos-engineering#distributed-systems#reliability

System DesignIntermediate

Consistent Hashing: The Secret Sauce of Distributed Scalability

Consistent Hashing: Scaling Without the Chaos In a distributed system, you need a way to map data keys to specific servers. The naive approach—server = hash(key) % N—works until you need to add or remove a server (N chan…

Apr 20, 20262 min read

Deep DiveDistributed Systems Fundamentals

#distributed-systems#consistent-hashing#scalability

System DesignAdvanced

Database Sharding Part 7: Case Study - Scaling Discord to Billions

Database Sharding Part 7: Case Study - Scaling Discord to Billions We have spent the last 6 parts of this series exploring the theoretical mathematics, routing algorithms, and migration playbooks for distributed database…

Apr 20, 20265 min read

Case StudyDatabase Sharding Mastery

#case-study#discord#scylladb

System DesignAdvanced

Distributed Data Observability: Metrics That Actually Matter

Distributed Data Observability: High-Signal Metrics In a distributed data system, CPU and RAM are "low-signal" metrics. A system can have 10% CPU usage and still be completely stalled. To truly understand the health of y…

Apr 20, 20262 min read

Deep Dive

#observability#monitoring#distributed-systems

DatabasesExpert

LSM-Tree Compaction Strategies: Leveled vs. Size-Tiered

LSM-Tree Compaction Strategies The storage engine is the heart of every high-performance NoSQL database (Cassandra, RocksDB, ScyllaDB). LSM-trees maximize write throughput by transforming random writes into sequential ap…

Apr 20, 20261 min read

Deep DiveDatabase Internals

#lsm-tree#storage-engine#performance

DatabasesAdvanced

LSM-Tree Compaction Strategies: Leveled vs. Size-Tiered

LSM-Tree Compaction Strategies LSM-tree based databases (Cassandra, RocksDB, ScyllaDB) don't update data in place. They write immutable SSTables. Over time, these files must be merged to reclaim space and improve reads.…

Apr 20, 20262 min read

Deep DiveBackend Systems Mastery

#databases#lsm-trees#cassandra

DatabasesAdvanced

Cassandra Data Modeling: Design for Queries, Not Entities

Cassandra is a write-optimized distributed database built for linear horizontal scalability. It stores data in a distributed hash ring — every node is equal, there's no primary, and data placement is determined by partit…

Jun 18, 20259 min read

Deep Dive

#cassandra#nosql#data modeling

System DesignAdvanced

System Design: Real-Time Chat Application at Scale

Real-time chat systems are among the most architecturally interesting distributed systems. They require persistent connections at massive scale, exactly-once message delivery guarantees, presence detection across million…

Mar 17, 202511 min read

Deep Dive

#system design#websocket#real-time