Cassandra originated at Facebook in 2007 to solve that company’s inbox search problem, in which they had to deal with large volumes of data in a way that was difficult to scale with traditional methods. Specifically, the team had requirements to handle huge volumes of data in the form of message copies, reverse indices of messages, and many random reads and many simultaneous random writes. For developers and administrators coming from the relational world, the Cassandra data model can be very difficult to understand initially.