.. glossary::

Glossary
========
	Cassandra
	   Apache Cassandra is a distributed, high-available, eventually consistent NoSQL open-source database.
	
	cluster
	   Two or more database instances that exchange messages using the gossip protocol.

	commitlog
	   A file to which the database appends changed data for recovery in the event of a hardware failure.

	datacenter
	   A group of related nodes that are configured together within a cluster for replication and workload segregation purposes. 
  	   Not necessarily a separate location or physical data center. Datacenter names are case-sensitive and cannot be changed.

	gossip
	   A peer-to-peer communication protocol for exchanging location and state information between nodes.
	
	hint
	   One of the three ways, in addition to read-repair and full/incremental anti-entropy repair, that Cassandra implements the eventual consistency guarantee that all updates are eventually received by all replicas.

	listen address
	   Address or interface to bind to and tell other Cassandra nodes to connect to

	seed node
	   A seed node is used to bootstrap the gossip process for new nodes joining a cluster. To learn the topology of the ring, a joining node contacts one of the nodes in the -seeds list in cassandra. yaml. The first time you bring up a node in a new cluster, only one node is the seed node.

	snitch
	   The mapping from the IP addresses of nodes to physical and virtual locations, such as racks and data centers. There are several types of snitches. 
	   The type of snitch affects the request routing mechanism.

	SSTable
	   An SSTable provides a persistent,ordered immutable map from keys to values, where both keys and values are arbitrary byte strings.