cassandra

A client for the Cassandra distributed database.

== License

Copyright 2009 Twitter, Inc. See included LICENSE file. Portions copyright 2004-2009 David Heinemeier Hansson, and used with permission.

The public certificate for this gem is here[http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/25331/evan_weaver-original-public_cert.pem]. 

== Features

* clean encapsulation of the Thrift API
* pluggable serialization and compression
* Ruby 1.9 compatibility

This is an alpha release and does not yet support the full Thrift API. 

Cassandra is a rapidly moving target, but this library should always run against the bundle available {here}[http://github.com/fauna/cassandra/raw/6546d1155b77ca7bc5ebf58bdcce79ddda36f611/vendor/cassandra.tar.bz2]. Don't expect it to work against any other version right now.

The Github source repository is {here}[http://github.com/fauna/cassandra/]; patches and contributions are very welcome.

== Installation

You need Ruby 1.8 or 1.9, and Thrift. 

If you don't want to install Thrift from {source}[http://incubator.apache.org/thrift/download/], you can use {this pre-packaged gem}[http://blog.evanweaver.com/files/cassandra/thrift-0.1.0.gem]. Once you have Thrift, just run:

  sudo gem install cassandra
  
== Usage

Require the library:
  
  require 'cassandra'
  
Connect to a server and keyspace:
  
  client = Cassandra.new('Twitter', "127.0.0.1")
  
Insert into a column family. You can insert a Cassandra::OrderedHash, or a regular Hash, if order doesn't matter:

  client.insert(:Users, "5", {'screen_name' => "buttonscat"})  

Insert into a super column family:

  client.insert(:UserRelationships, "5", {"user_timeline" => {"1" => ""}})

Query a super column:

  timeline = client.get(:UserRelationships, "5", "user_timeline")
  
The returned result will always be a Cassandra::OrderedHash.

See Cassandra for more methods.

== Further reading

* {Up and Running With Cassandra}[http://blog.evanweaver.com/articles/2009/07/06/up-and-running-with-cassandra]

== Reporting problems

The Github issue tracker is {here}[http://github.com/fauna/cassandra/issues]. If you have problems with Cassandra itself, please use the {cassandra-user mailing list}[http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-cassandra-user/].