What is Apache Cassandra?
Apache Cassandra is an open-source distributed database system originally developed and open-sourced by Facebook. It is designed to be highly scalable, high-performance, and highly available, with features like decentralization, no single point of failure, and automatic data sharding. Cassandra is primarily used for distributed storage and real-time querying of large-scale data sets, particularly suited for applications that require high scalability and performance, such as social networks, real-time analytics, and log storage. Cassandra employs a column-based data model and distributed architecture, allowing data to be distributed across multiple nodes and providing horizontal scalability by easily adding more nodes to increase storage capacity and processing power.