When Cassandra Is the Wrong Tool
August 11, 2026
We make our living on Cassandra, so believe us when we say: plenty of systems shouldn't use it. The workload shapes that fight the architecture, and what to reach for instead.
Read moreTutorials
Field notes from operating Cassandra in production.
Repair and Compaction Hygiene: The Chores That Prevent the Pages
July 21, 2026
Nobody gets promoted for running repairs on schedule — but most Cassandra incidents trace back to hygiene that quietly stopped. What to run, how often, and the metrics that prove it's working.
Read moreA Working Runbook for Cassandra 4.x to 5 Upgrades
June 16, 2026
Cassandra 5 is worth the move — UCS, vector types, better indexes — but major upgrades reward ceremony. The pre-flight checks, rolling procedure, and rollback criteria we use on real clusters.
Read moreTombstones: Finding Them Before They Find Your Read Latency
May 19, 2026
Deletes in Cassandra are writes, and they linger. A field guide to diagnosing tombstone problems — the warning signs, the queries that surface them, and the schema patterns that create them.
Read morePartition Key Design: The Decision You Can't Refactor Later
April 14, 2026
Every Cassandra performance problem worth its name traces back to a partition key. Here is how to choose one that stays bounded, spreads load, and answers your queries — before the data arrives.
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