Cassandra is an open source, NoSQL database that is highly scalable and provides high availability. You can use Cassandra to store large amounts of data spread across data centers or when your applications require high write access speed.

In a Cassandra database, a column family is similar to a table in a relational database and consists of columns and rows. Similar to the relational database, each row is uniquely identified by a row key. The column name uniquely identifies each column in the column family. The number of columns in each row can vary, and client applications can determine the number of columns in each row.

You can read, write, and manipulate a group of data by using collections in Cassandra. The Cassandra database supports the following collection types:

List
. A list is a collection of one or more ordered elements.
Set
. A set is a collection of one or more elements.
Map
. A map is a collection of key-value pairs.

You can configure the data object write operation properties that determine how data can be loaded to Cassandra targets. After you create an Cassandra data object, create a write operation. You can use the Cassandra data object write operation as a target in streaming mappings. You can create the data object write operation for the Cassandra data object automatically. Then, edit the advanced properties of the data object write operation and run a mapping.

You can import a Cassandra column family as an ODBC data object and create streaming mappings to write data to Cassandra. You must configure the ODBC driver before you import Cassandra column families. When you run a Cassandra mapping, the Data Integration Service uses the Informatica Cassandra ODBC data source to load data to the Cassandra database. When you run Cassandra mappings, ensure that the optimization level is set to none. If you do not set the optimization level as none, the mappings might fail.