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It’s time for another programming quiz. Today, we’re testing your knowledge of Apache Cassandra!

July 2018 marks the ten year anniversary of Apache Cassandra as an open source project. Since it was initially launched a decade ago, this database has become a top level Apache Software Foundation project and has been used by thousands of developers to power their applications.

To mark this, we worked with Patrick McFadin, Vice President of Developer Relations at DataStax to come up with a quiz to test your knowledge about Cassandra.

Answer the following ten questions, and see how much you know about Cassandra for yourself!

1. Developers at which social network originally developed Cassandra, and then made it available as open source?
a) Facebook
b) Twitter
c) Instagram
d) MySpace

2. Why is Cassandra called Cassandra?
a) The developers named the project after one of their sisters, who always claimed to know everything.
b) It’s a backronym – Continually ASSessing, ANy Data ReAdy.
c) It’s a reference to Greek myth – Cassandra was a cursed oracle, who would tell the truth, but nobody would believe her. The developers thought their database design was better than Oracle for handling data at scale.
d) The developers named it after a dog that was in the office – it ran faster than all the other pets.

SEE ALSO: “Enterprises recognize Apache Cassandra as the de facto standard for databases at scale”

3. When did Cassandra become an Apache Software Foundation project?
a) July 2008
b) December 2008
c) January 2009
d) July 2009

4. When was the term NoSQL first used?
a) 1988
b) 1998
c) 2009
d) 2018

5. When did Cassandra 1.0 launch?
a) July 2009
b) January 2010
c) December 2010
d) October 2011

6. In Cassandra 2.0, lightweight transactions were introduced to deliver transactional isolation. What principle underpins linearizable consistency?
a) The Paxos principle
b) The Paxo principle
c) The Bisto principle
d) Err, it’s all gravy to me.

SEE ALSO: Instaclustr: “We want to help grow the Apache Cassandra project”

7. How big is the largest Cassandra deployment?
a) 75 nodes
b) 750 nodes
c) 7,500 nodes
d) 75,000 nodes

8. What does CQL stand for?
a) Cassandra Query Language
b) Cassandra Questions Language
c) Cassandra Query List
d) Clearly Questionable Language

9. What year was the release of the first commercial distribution of Apache Cassandra, DataStax Enterprise?
a) 2009
b) 2010
c) 2011
d) 2012

10. What two papers are the basis for Apache Cassandra?
a) Paxos Made Simple and Cluster Based Scalable Network Services
b) Dynamo Paper and Google Big Table
c) Brewer’s Cap Theorem and Towards Robust Distributed Systems
d) Trading Consistency for Availability in Distributed Systems and Thrift Based Database Protocols

SEE ALSO: Apache Cassandra leads the way in latest NoSQL benchmark

Answers

1. a) Facebook. Instagram actually launched in 2010 and runs on Cassandra.

2. c) it’s a reference to Greek Myth. Cassandra could see the future, but she was never believed by those who heard her.

3. c) it was January 2009.

4. b) Carlos Strozzi used the term NoSQL for his lightweight relational database Strozzi NoSQL in 1998. However, the popular use of NoSQL to describe open source and non-relational databases was started in 2009.

5. d) October 2011. This included a rewrite of Cassandra. DataStax launched their paid product DataStax Enterprise version 1.0 at the same time.

6. a) The Paxos Principle, which covers how a group of nodes can decide which of them holds the correct data. This can be used to deliver consistency across fully distributed systems that hold data in different locations.

7. d) Apple runs 75,000 Cassandra nodes.

8. a) Cassandra Query Language was launched in 2012 to provide a familiar language for developers to use. Based on SQL, CQL makes it easier for developers to work with Cassandra.

9. c) 2011. V1 of DataStax Enterprise was released with built-in Hadoop support.

10. b) Dynamo paper and Google Big Table.

SEE ALSO: What’s new in Cassandra 3.0?

Results

How well did you do? Do you know your Cassandra trivia?

0-3 correct: You’re just a beginner.

4-6 correct: You’re pretty solid in your Apache Cassandra trivia, but you still might need to pay a little more attention to the details.

7-9 correct: Nice! You really know your stuff!

10 correct: You are an Apache Cassandra master.