This last Tuesday EURA NOVA hosted an interesting Cassandra meetup. Several tech enthusiasts and Cassandra fans have met each other for two talks: I briefly introduced what are the challenges and potential solution when building a distributed graph layer on top of Cassandra, the second talk, presented by Ansar Rafique, was a general introduction to Cassandra and some performance comparisons against MySQL. Ansar is a PhD student at the department of Computer Science of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven – Language technology and middleware taskforce (LANTAM) of the DistriNet research group. The talk presented the result of Ansar’s previous researches at Cinnober Financial Technology about factors influencing Read/Write operation in MySQL and Cassandra.