Hello, I am hardly a developer, so this isn't directly addressed to me, but if I may comment on a couple of things from an outsider's (non-developer, new to this scale of database) perspective.
On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 12:38 AM, Eric Evans<[email protected]> wrote: > On Tue, 2009-08-11 at 10:37 -0700, Evan Weaver wrote: >> In my experience, the naming of the data model has been a huge barrier >> to entry for users of Cassandra. This goes both for people familiar >> with SQL, and for people familiar with BigTable. I would like to >> change this before 0.4, since the 0.3 to 0.4 transition is the Great >> API Breakening. I agree that there is a barrier, specifically because most people have no experience with this type of data structure and as you mention are coming from SQL. Clearer names along with more documentation/examples will help grow the user base of Cassandra quite a bit. >> So technically this is not a bikeshed, because I'm happy to do all the >> work. I'll even submit a patch for Digg's Python client. Since there >> are no production deployments of ASF, and only a couple >> well-maintained clients, now is the time to break the world. A few >> hours of work now will pay off richly in terms of community >> involvement and reduced noob-explanation-time. I would offer my services here also if a change were accepted. And while I don't know what the exact names should be (nor am I qualified tbh), I think they should be clearer than they are. At this point they seem to be a mixture of RDBMS and Document DB terms. The change to 'keyspace' from 'table' I think was a first step in this process, but it should be taken further and all names normalized across the board to properly represent their relationship with each other. At least that's my very humble opinion. In response to Mr. Evan's comment regarding the Bigtable paper, does the Cassandra community want this to be a requirement for using the software? I would think not. Sure, most early adopters are coming from that paper, but it shouldn't be a source of entry to use the database, but rather to develop it. Again, my opinion carries little weight, but +1 from this user. Thanks for everyone's hard work, I am really excited to see how this project continues to progress. -- # Curt Micol
