October 26, 2026 · RapidMindLabs
An ALTER TABLE is thirty characters of CQL and one of the few operations that can split a running cluster's view of itself. How schema propagation works today, the DDL that is safe and the DDL that is not, and how Transactional Cluster Metadata in the 5.x line removes the class of problem.
Read moreOctober 12, 2026
Most sizing conversations start with a storage number and end with a surprise. Here is the arithmetic we actually use — replicated bytes, compaction headroom, per-node density limits, and the streaming time that decides how big a node is allowed to get.
Read moreOctober 5, 2026
Turning on authentication, encryption, and audit logging is easy on a laptop and risky on a live cluster. The phase order we use, the system_auth detail that locks teams out, and why 'optional: true' is the whole trick for TLS.
Read moreSeptember 28, 2026 · RapidMindLabs
Most Cassandra dashboards show hundreds of metrics and warn you about none of them in time. Here are the signals that lead incidents by hours or days, the thresholds we use, and how virtual tables let you answer questions at the cqlsh prompt during a page.
Read moreSeptember 21, 2026
Telemetry and event data are the workload Cassandra was built for — and the one teams most often model into a corner. Time bucketing math, TTL rules, and the TWCS settings that decide whether expired data actually leaves disk.
Read moreSeptember 21, 2026
A node dies at 03:00 and someone reaches for nodetool. What actually happens during bootstrap and replace, which settings decide whether streaming finishes, and the ordering mistakes that cost teams a consistency incident instead of an afternoon.
Read moreSeptember 21, 2026 · RapidMindLabs
Sooner or later something downstream needs every change your cluster accepts — a search index, a warehouse, a Kafka topic. Cassandra's CDC is real but narrow. What the commit-log feed actually gives you, where the dedup and ordering work lands, and when to stop and pick a different pattern.
Read moreSeptember 18, 2026 · RapidMindLabs
Most Cassandra latency outliers we chase are garbage collection pauses, not disks. What to set for heap and collector on JDK 17, why Cassandra 5's trie memtables change the arithmetic, and how to prove a change helped.
Read moreSeptember 16, 2026 · RapidMindLabs
Running Cassandra on Kubernetes is now a normal choice, not a brave one — but the operator automates the easy half of the job. What cass-operator and K8ssandra genuinely solve, the storage and scheduling decisions nobody can make for you, and when staying on VMs is the right call.
Read moreSeptember 15, 2026
Cassandra 5 ships UCS, one compaction strategy with a dial that spans tiered and leveled behaviour. Here is what the parameters actually mean, how to migrate a table without a write-amplification surprise, and which tables we still leave on TWCS.
Read moreSeptember 14, 2026 · RapidMindLabs
Half the Cassandra latency incidents we review are not cluster problems. They are driver defaults nobody revisited. What to set for timeouts, retry policy, speculative execution, load balancing, and paging — and how each default fails.
Read moreSeptember 14, 2026 · RapidMindLabs
Replication is not backup. A practical scheme for Cassandra snapshots, incremental backups, and commit-log archiving — plus the four restore scenarios worth rehearsing and the RPO/RTO numbers each one really gives you.
Read moreSeptember 11, 2026 · RapidMindLabs
The multi-DC expansion runbook: NetworkTopologyStrategy changes, nodetool rebuild, the auth keyspace everyone forgets, and the exact order that keeps reads correct while the new DC is still empty.
Read moreJuly 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 moreMay 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 more