FYI, there's a couple Cassandra events coming up in April and May in the Bay area:
Wednesday, April 27, 1pm-6pm: Free Cassandra training by DataStax, hosted by Ooyala! *Space is limited*; you can sign up at http://www.datastax.com/freetraining. Wednesday, April 27, 6pm-8pm (yes, the evening of the training day): DataStax and Ooyala will be hosting a meet n' greet with pizza, beer, and Cassandra. The event begins with a happy hour from 6PM to 7PM. Following the happy hour, Ooyala staff will show how they're using Cassandra to power their analytics. (Some background material at [1].) DataStax engineers will also be there to share details about Brisk[2], the new open source Hadoop distribution that uses Cassandra for its core services. RSVP at http://www.meetup.com/Cassandra-User-Group-Meeting/events/17283903/ Monday, May 9, 2011, 6:45pm: The San Francisco Geo Meetup will feature a presentation by Mike Malone of SimpleGeo. Mike will explain how and why the company built its own data indexing scheme using Apache Cassandra; some background is at [3]. This is a great opportunity to to see the type of problems that arise when working with multidimensional spatial data. RSVP at http://www.meetup.com/geomeetup/events/17034143/ [1] http://www.ooyala.com/whitepapers/Cassandrawhitepaper.pdf [2] http://www.datastax.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/WP-Brisk.pdf [3] http://www.slideshare.net/mmalone/working-with-dimensional-data-in-distributed-hash-tables -- Jonathan Ellis Project Chair, Apache Cassandra co-founder of DataStax, the source for professional Cassandra support http://www.datastax.com