Cassandra: The Definitive Guide

Chapter 8. Clients

We’re used to connecting to relational databases using drivers. For example, in Java, JDBC is an API that abstracts the vendor implementation of the relational database to present a consistent way of storing and retrieving data using Statements, PreparedStatements, ResultSets, and so forth. To interact with the database you get a driver that works with the particular database you’re using, such as Oracle, SQL Server, or MySQL; the implementation details of this interaction are hidden from the developer. Given the right driver, you can use a wide variety of programming languages to connect to a wide variety of databases.

Cassandra is somewhat different in that there are no drivers for it. If you’ve decided to use Python to interact with Cassandra, you don’t go out and find a Cassandra driver for Python; there is no such thing. Instead of just abstracting the database interactions from the developer’s point of view, the way JDBC does, an entirely different mechanism is used. This is a client generation layer, provided by the Thrift API and the Avro project. But there are also high-level Cassandra clients for Java, Scala, Ruby, C#, Python, Perl, PHP, C++, and other languages, written as conveniences by third-party developers.

There are benefits to these clients, in that you can easily embed them in your own applications (which we’ll see how to do) and that they frequently offer more features than the basic Thrift interface does, including connection pooling and JMX ...