 Welcome to SiliconANGLE.tv, the Cube. We are here live in Santa Clara, Silicon Valley in California. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE.com and we are here live to bring you extensive coverage of Cassandra Summit 12, where Cassandra Community is going to explore technical tracks and all the future of NoSQL, which is the new hotness. The big debate has been structured databases, unstructured database, the database wars, database confusion, the bottom line with cloud, mobile and social. You're seeing a huge surge in pressure from database vendors to capture that unstructured data and put in the structures. Again, I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE.com. I'm joined by my co-host for this show, Jeff Kelly from wikibond.org, the best analyst in the business for big data. Jeff, welcome to Cube 2. We were just at the Hadoop Summit. We were, not too long ago. The big data world is ours to our oyster where we feed on all this great knowledge and want to share that with the world. Cube is our flagship telecast. We extract a signal from the noises, share that with you. Jeff, just my commentary right now on the Cassandra marketplace. And we've talked about this at Hortonworks Hadoop Summit, where we had Jeffrey Moran talking about crossing the chasm. We actually had Billy, Billy the CEO of DataStacks on theCUBE at Hortonworks Hadoop Summit. And we talked about this database war or this database vendor contest, like NASCAR. It's like they're all in position, they're jockeying, Hadoop's out front, huge momentum with Hadoop. You've got Couch, you've got Mongo, you've got Cassandra, and that someone's going to have to slingshot and make a move. But it's not a winner-take-all game, is it? Not necessarily, I mean, there are different use cases that apply to different NoSQL databases. So it's not necessarily a winner-take-all situation, but I definitely agree there's going to be a couple winners and a lot of losers. So it really matters in terms of community involvement, community momentum, and kind of, you know, the community as supporting these open source projects is really important. One of the things that we've been noticing in the Big Data trend here, folks, is that we've been on the ground with theCUBE at SiliconANGLE.tv with Wikibon research team with SiliconANGLE. We've been at Hadoop World, the original. We've been at all the Hadoop World, all the Hadoop summits, now we're at the Cassandra Summit, and we'll be doing the big, covering the big data like a blanket on SiliconANGLE.com. And for research, go to Wikibon.org. So one thing that's really clear is that we are in a inflection point as a marketplace, Jeff, where you're seeing this massive shift with mobile computing and cloud really energizing the application marketplace, which leads to the kinds of conversations to go back in tech history. Microsoft, Intel, Wintel created that revolution in computing, and recently VMware hired a new CEO, Pat Gelsinger, a friend of theCUBE from EMC, now the CEO of VMware. And you see Cloud Foundry, you see the hypervisor in the enterprise, you see the consumerization of IT, all that infrastructure is in position with converged infrastructure to explode out and leverage on mobile computing, and that application growth is putting a lot of pressure on the database market. And you're seeing NoSQL being a big part of that, but the marketplace we've heard from data scientists to programming is that specialism and specialists' software is moving to general purpose. What's your take on that, and talk about your research or some of your findings when you talk to vendors, obviously NoSQL, it's hard to use HBase and Cassandra, very difficult some say, they're trying to be easier. What's your take on the whole specialism to general purpose databases, and how does that affect the application market? Well, certainly as you say, a lot of the NoSQL databases platforms out there are difficult to use, and what we're seeing from vendors like DataStacks and others is essentially trying to put this wrapper around NoSQL databases to make them easier to use, and in some cases, it's bringing in SQL-like capabilities, kind of on top, to kind of mask some of the complexity. For instance, we're seeing a company called Hedapt, which is out in Cambridge, Mass, where I'm at, and they're doing some interesting things where they're building a platform, essentially where they integrate natively SQL into a Hadoop environment, and essentially abstract away the complexity so that the user doesn't necessarily know which processing model is being used. So we're seeing methods like that, which you could call that more generalization, making some other big data platforms more general. They're doing some interesting work there. Of course, DataStacks, with their enterprise product, kind of combining Hadoop, Cassandra, and Solar to make it more applicable across use cases. So we're seeing- Well, you see, you mentioned Hedapt, which is a startup in Massachusetts. Well, we have some other startups that we've been running into, OneWired Magazine-profiled, Squirrel application, I've got the name of the company, it's called Squirrel. Squirrel, and they're working on an open source project called Accumulo. Accumulo. So that's cell-level data. Right, they essentially took the guys from Squirrel when they were internal at the NSA. They needed to, obviously they needed some big data capabilities. So they looked at Google Bigtable, decided it wasn't secure enough, so they kind of re-engineered it to include cell-level security from the ground up natively. And now they've spun out of the NSA, and they're starting Squirrel, kind of a soft launch this week, I believe, and essentially what they're kind of positioning Accumulo as a competitor to Cassandra HBase. Another no-SQL database, but with better security, they say, better performance, scalability, you don't lose as much data when you scale at rapid ingest rates. So we're seeing all these different no-SQL databases come out, they're all kind of attacking a similar problem, but they're all doing it in kind of different ways, and there are definitely subtle, different use cases among each one, so it's not necessarily a winner-take-all, but they're probably not in enough room for all the different vendors we're seeing right now. You mentioned use cases. Folks, we are going to drill down on the use cases here. We're going to have Jonathan Ellis, the CTO co-founder of Datastax on, to really get down and talk about some of the real use cases and get in the weeds with the tech and really address some of the criticisms, and yet the opportunity that Cassandra brings to the table. Cassandra has been in the, I would say, the shadows relative to Hadoop in terms of on the height meter, so we want to explore that. Obviously, in their keynote, Jonathan and Billy, the CEO of Datastax, pointed out that just in production alone, Datastax ecosystem, the Cassandra ecosystem, has really grown over the past year. We want to drill on what's going on in the production environments, but really what's going on is that the big data world is really about, there are a variety of tools and use cases, so the diversity of use cases is so wide that brings up the, there isn't going to be one winner. We have CatSandra, we have HBase, we've got Mongo, we have different approaches, Jeff, and we're going to explore that. We're also going to have Eddie Slattery, the big data evangelist from Splunk. Splunk has been really, been giving a lot of kudos with their analytics, and this is an area that Cassandra has suffered in the forums and in Quora around the analytics. Splunk has stepped up to take that role. Also, we're going to have Adrian Cockcroft, who's going to do a killer demo. He'll be coming on theCUBE right after his demo, where he's going to be spinning up, in real time, 48 node cluster on Amazon. CTO of Netflix. CTO of Netflix. And they've been in the press lately around the crash of the storm on the East Coast, the quote, power generators. I really want to ask Adrian, really, is it a one cloud fits all? Is it a one database fits all? I want to talk about those use cases, so. And Cassandra fits into that equation with this kind of being able to distribute geographically and kind of prevent potentially those kind of downtime events. And just my overall take on the Cassandra community right now is that it's not a dying community by far. It's really robust. It's a packed house. It's on the keynote. Absolutely jam packed. This community is active. And they're, I don't want to say a chip on their shoulder, Jeff, but they definitely have seen Hadoop take the limelight. And we're seeing companies like Hortonworks within Apache kicking some serious butt out there. H Catalog recently announced they announced a new data platform. Cloudera's been kind of quiet lately. I mean, we've seen them. They've been on theCUBE. Cloudera as well. So obviously we love Hadoop. We love open source. We love open source and scale out. What's your take before we get into the guests today? What are you expecting to hear today? And what are you looking for? Well, I think you nailed it earlier. Use cases. I think what it boils down to is what is Cassandra good for? What are the use cases it's supporting today and what use cases will it support tomorrow? And let's focus on the right tool for the right job I think is important. So there's a lot of, especially in the press, there's a lot of talk about who's going to win. Is it going to be Hadoop? Is it going to be another platform? Well, I don't think it's going to be just one. There are different horses for courses as they say. So what I really want to drill down to today. Horses for horses or horses for courses? Horses for courses. Horses for horses. Horses for horses. That's Dave Vellante's horse analogy. And it's a good one, isn't it? So we'll definitely want to drill down into that to use cases, talk about a little bit about some of those challenges that the community faces in terms of, you can see you read right questions. It was a great post on core that I read that really liked, which was AlphaGeek said, hey, you know, it's not about the tools, it's about the brain of the developer. And any developer with chops will look at a problem and not try to force a stack into the solution. And that there's a variety of different stacks you can take into solving a problem. So that brings up the whole personality. So one of the things I'm looking for in this CUBE event today is to find out what is the personality of the Cassandra community? What are these, who are these folks? What are they into? What's their, what's the demographic? What's the psychographic? What's their mindset? What use cases are they pivoting on? What are they doubling down on? And also, what's the feeling around, the other databases, Mongo, Couch, HBase? We know Billy Bossworth slammed HBase in his keynote. He basically implied that it's difficult to use. I had that on social cam, Mark Hopkins. If you grab my social cam feed, I got the Billy's slam on HBase. We want to drill down on that today as well too. So a lot of great stuff coming on all day today here inside SiliconANGLE.com is the CUBE with Wikibon's Jeff Kelly. I'm John Furrier. This is our flagship telecast. We go out to the events and extract a signal from the noise. We write back with our guests and our next guest is going to be Jonathan Ellis, the CTO co-founder of Datastacks. We'll go in and we'll talk about what's going on with Cassandra, within Apache and within some of the key tech aspects of.