Recently, we got invited to speak at StampedeCon, a “Big Data conference series” hosted at Washington University in St. Louis. It had been a while since I’d presented, but I was really looking forward to this as it brought me back to one of the things I like to do most which is evangelize Apache Cassandra to new users.

StampedeCon itself was an interesting mix of folks:

• Academia and research from the university (particularly folks in epidemiology)
• Big industry (and the systems integrators who love them)
• Some local startups (of which St. Louis had a surprising amount)

The schedule was well thought out with two days of hands-on tutorials (including an excellent Cassandra one tought by TLP pal Sameer Farooqui) followed by two days of presentations. There were good opportunities for networking sprinkled throughout.

Given the mix of the crowd and the number of folks new to Big Data, I went high-level and focused my presentation on three real-world use cases of Cassandra and a distilled list of best practices from such.

The presentation is online here. It’s a quick read through and, even if you’ve been working with Cassandra for a while, may contain some things you don’t know.

As always, we are open to comments and suggestions on anything we publish, so let us know what you think.