Ad-hoc Learning

In this unit, we will be taking a look at some alternate ways to perform reads in Apache Cassandra or DataStax Enterprise. For example, in some cases using an index may be helpful. Or if certain requirements or queries change, it may be possible to enable these changes without completely overhauling your data model. 

Using Apache Cassandra at the core of DataStax Enterprise, write operations are designed to be as efficient as possible. But there are some techniques that can be used in terms of data modelling for dealing with specific challenges. We discuss this further in this unit, with a focus on batches and lightweight transactions.

Now lets get down to creating table in Apache Cassandra! That's what this unit is all about. This is how we create our physical data model.

Now let's get into the details of creating a logical data model. In this unit, we go through some rules to consider when putting together your logical data model.

In this unit, you will learn how to map your conceptual data model to a logical one, also using the access patterns from your application workflow. 

We need to figure out how users are going to navigate through our application. We call this the application workflow. This is necessary so we know which queries to perform against our Apache Cassandra database. Learn more about the application workflow in this unit.

Conceptual data modeling is essentially taking all the objects in your domain, determining their attributes and seeing how all of them are related together. In this unit, you will learn about conceptual data modeling with Apache Cassandra.

User Defined Functions and User Defined Aggregates are a little bit complex. We tend to use these in conjunction with one another to get the functionality we need in our table. Learn more about UDFs and UDAs in this unit.

In this unit, we will be moving on to the counters data type. A counter is a data type where you can store a 64-bit signed integer that can be incremented or decremented. These could be useful, depending on your data model.

In this unit you will be learning about UDTs, or User Defined Types. These are useful if you need to store a more complex data structure wihin a single cell in your table.