A very quick introduction to Cassandra database plus accessing it from PHP. My slides from my 5 minute "lightening" talk at PHP London on 1/7/2010.

1. A (very) quick introduction to using PHP and Cassandra @davegardnerisme

3. Brings together Dynamo and Bigtable

4. Schema-less

6. Fault tolerant – no single point of failure

7. Hadoop integration for scalable Map Reduce

9. Some people say Cassandra is a 4 or 5 level hash (1)[KeySpace][ColumnFamily][Key][Column][KeySpace][ColumnFamily][Key][SuperColumn][SubColumn]

10. Configuring – storage-conf.xml <ColumnFamilyName="Standard1" CompareWith="BytesType"/> <ColumnFamilyName="Standard2" CompareWith="UTF8Type"/> <ColumnFamilyName="Super1" ColumnType="Super" CompareWith="BytesType" CompareSubcolumnsWith="BytesType" /> Good example within an easily understandableproblem domain: Twissandra! (2)

12. Higher level libraries do exist; PHPCassa (4) and Pandra(5)

13. Compile Thrift which will generate the PHP libraries for you (6)

15. // Inserting multiple columns for a single row // (bit like populating one row of MySQL) $key ='UniqueRowKey'; $columnFamily='ResponsePersonality'; $mutationMap=array( $key=>array($columnFamily=>array()) ); // add our first column: $column =new cassandra_Column(array( 'name'=>'howMuchWork', 'value'=> 'quiteABit', 'timestamp'=> time() )); $columnOrSupercolumn=new cassandra_ColumnOrSuperColumn( array('column'=>$column)); $mutationMap[$key][$columnFamily][] = new cassandra_Mutation(array('column_or_supercolumn'=>$columnOrSupercolumn));

16. // add our second column!: $column =new cassandra_Column(array( 'name'=>'nextColumnName', 'value'=> 'wow', 'timestamp'=> time() )); $columnOrSupercolumn=new cassandra_ColumnOrSuperColumn( array('column'=>$column)); $mutationMap[$key][$columnFamily][] = new cassandra_Mutation(array('column_or_supercolumn'=>$columnOrSupercolumn)); // repeat with other columns ... // finally we call batch_mutate to add! $client->batch_mutate( $keyspace, $mutationMap, $consistencyLevelZero);

18. Support for PIG (higher level language) (7)

19. Cassandra 0.7 will include output support (8)

21. References/links Using Cassandra with PHP (installing Thrift)https://wiki.fourkitchens.com/display/PF/Using+Cassandra+with+PHP Hadoop Support in Cassandra:http://wiki.apache.org/cassandra/HadoopSupport Output support in Cassandra:https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-1101 Hive support (feature request!):https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-913