Cassandra Day London 2015

You wouldn't try and use a saw to hammer a nail so why do people try to use databases as queues? Or perhaps more subtly: rely on atomic updates to mutable data distributed across the world (when you say it out loud is sounds a bit ridiculous right?)

In this talk we're going to go through the most common ways to misuse Cassandra. Some are obvious and you should be using a different kind of technology, like the queue example, but others you just need to change the way you're using Cassandra.

Topics we'll cover:
* Joins (yes we'll get started with the obvious one)
* Mutable data / read then write / breaking the laws of physics
* Really wide rows (but the Internet said wide rows were good?)
* Batches!
* Multi partition queries a.k.a ReadTimeout heaven
* Secondary indexes under the covers
* Tripping over tombstones

Crazy retry policies: I am looking at you Downgrading retry policy
Misusing technology isn't isolated to the distributed database world, I used to work on a small piece of queueing software called WebSphereMQ and what do you know? A good portion of our customers used it as a database!