Cassandra Summit Europe 2013

Talks, meetups, training and lot of interesting conversations: This was Cassandra Summit Europe 2013 from October 16 to 18 at the Barbican Centre in London. Two intense days of real-world use cases, technical insights and a glimpse into what’s coming with Apache Cassandra. And our team got their developer certifications. Congratulation, guys! 🙂

Day 1

The first day of the summit featured a workshop with a morning session covering the basics of using Cassandra CQL Interface and the Datastax Java Driver in a simple, web-based Java application. The afternoon sessions consisted of an excellent talk by Aaron Morton (The Last Pickle), Cassandra consultant and committer, who provided a technical overview of Cassandra. This was definitely the best part of the day 1 workshop.

The evening featured a meet-up with a Q&A which was unfortunately hard to follow acustically due to the large number of participants. It gave us, however, the opportunity to talk to the Datastax team members responsible for Austria, Germany and Switzerland. By the way: You do not believe how many conversations can be centered about Arnold Schwarzenegger once people realize you’re actually Austrian 😉
Finally, the evening ended in a long-awaited catch-up with Richard Conway and Andy Cross from our London-based partner company Elastacloud. Thanks for the drinks & food, guys!

Day 2

Day 2 started with the well-presented keynote by Jonathan Ellis, co-founder of Datastax, giving insights into the new features of Cassandra 2.0 and the roadmap to go as well as the announcement of the Datastax Dev Center, a graphical database editor.

After this kick-off, the conference continued in four different rooms with numerous interesting talks about applications using Cassandra, solving Use Cases and building and operating Cassandra-based software. Tim Moreton of Acunu showed their approach of doing BI with Apache Cassandra, while Jean Armel Luce (Orange) gave an insight into usage of Cassandra in three datacenters. In general, many of the talks centered around typical problems of the big data world, with Cassandra as the persistence engine and very often Hadoop or Spark as cluster computing framework.

This day also gave us the opportunity to have good talks with Datastax representatives. Stay tuned for more about this!

The day finished with an (again) excellent talk by Aaron Morten about Cassandra internals which showed the path a request takes through the code base and elaborated on the event-driven design principles Cassandra is based on, and Al Tobey (Datastax) talking about Extreme Cassandra Optimization. At last, the lightning talks featured a short presentation about Achilles, an open-source Java persistence manager for Cassandra.

Conclusion

Two days of exciting talks and interesting conversations: It was great to be part of such an active community with lots of interesting use cases and business requirements. And it was great so see our UK-based partners for a chat in person rather than online.

We’re really looking forward for an exciting year in the Apache Cassandra community.