Cassandra > Basics > Overview
Apache Cassandra is an open source distributed database that is built above the amazon Dynamo data distribution design and the bigtable data model. It is built to manage and handle very large amount of data that can be deployed across many servers and still provide high availability and performance. Cassandra's ring architecture is designed to be a peer-to-peer decentralised system where there is no single point of failure. The architecture is masterless and all the nodes are equally important. This distributed nature of its architecture allows for better scalability , high availability and operations simplicity. Additionally, Cassandra supports a SQL-like query language called CQL that can be used easily during the modelling and retrieving of the stored data.