Cassandra - problems, issues, worries

Normally I "live" in .NET environment. That is, my work is usually related to .NET environment and most popular libraries associated with it. Some time ago, I started to work with Cassandra. Google it. Popular. Superb. Advanced. Supreme. Design for speed and resilience. Used by some big players. That sort of impression you will get. Therefore, just few days after meeting Cassandra I've had an eye opener. From my perspective, when I switched from .NET and start to develop solution based on Cassandra, it hit me. Cassandra is very rare specie. Developers who knows it - are more like extinct developers. Therefore online materials or help which you can get is way more limited than it is for .NET.

The most popular website for asking for help or advice is StackOverflow, for programmers. Just to give you a feeling, how .NET tag is more popular than Cassandra tag look at this:

What does it mean?

Back then when I was learning about Cassandra I've read every question tagged with Cassandra tag. I've even been able to answer some of them - it was much easier for me, as a beginner in Cassandra than to answer questions about .NET - where my knowledge and experience is way more broad. This is mostly because for answering .NET question you have around one minute, before somebody else's answer pops up, while for Cassandra question you have around one day or sometimes even more.

That also means when you have a problem - either with the client or Cassandra node itself - it may be hard to find help. Consider my question on StackOverflow: Cassandra routing key not set due to ArgumentException: Column column_aliases not found

This time I was lucky. I've received an answer quickly and the problem was easily fixable. However, the question was viewed only 73 times during 3 months!

Unfortunately, I have other example, which I will describe some other time... Stay tuned.