Action Research Paper: Establish a Career as a Software Developer - JAVA User Interface (UI)

Introduction

History of Cassandra

Cassandra originated at Facebook in 2008, it was developed to power Facebook's inbox search feature. The original developers were Prashant Malik and Avinash Lakshman (author of Amazon's Dynamo). Cassandra had been in production at Facebook for a while then it was released as an open source project on Google code Big table in July of 2008. Cassandra was later accepted by Apache Foundation as an incubator project in March of 2009 and it became a top-level Apache project in February of 2010. After its graduation to a top-level Apache project, cassandra has come a long way to support Hadoop connectivity, text search integration through solar. Cassandra query language, zero downtime upgrades, virtual nodes and self-tuning caches are the features that makes unique about it. There are new features being added continuously to cassandra and it is in constant heavy development (Vishwakarma, 2017, para. 2).

Cassandra is one of the most popular NoSQL databases in the world right now. So, for those of who aren't familiar what is a NoSQL database, it's another uplift to data stores that takes us away from the relational model which is what many software engineers and developers spend their whole lives using SQL server, My SQL, Oracle postages and on all relational distributed databases (Datastax Academy).

Most of these databases would eventually come to adopt SQL (Structured Query Language) and these are data stores that primarily were key value that they were non-relational so we could store large amounts of data by associating them just with the keys and query based. It was known an interesting model that there are NoSQL databases like MongoDB which is a document store and there was Google big table which is a column family from which is what Cassandra was based off (Vishwakarma, 2017, P. 3).

Why Apache Cassandra

Many of the organizations in the present world uses lots of data that cannot be stored or operated from single place. Cassandra has many best features that over comes many business problems as it is a distributed data base managing large amounts of structured data across many commodity servers (Edureka, 2014). With No Single point Failure (NSpF) it is responsible for its ability to scale, perform, and offer continuous uptime. There is no Master Node, every individual node has an identical role equally that all nodes communicating with each other. We can edit, write and read data from any of the nodes with having the accessible permission (Datastax Academy).

So, I choose “Apache Cassandra NoSQL” based up on the present generations that data is highly valuable and to be secured. It is used by most of the top organizations like Facebook, Netflix, HP, Adobe, Twitter, IBM etc., I believe this platform will guide me in my career success.

Planning to Accomplish

Using this technology in my career path and planning according to the desired requirements to achieve goals one by one, finally I see myself as a Cassandra NoSQL developer and Data Architecture in Cassandra. Through this paper, Action research is a process which will help me out to get the required results to a have good start in my career. In my career path, learning Apache Cassandra NoSQL with help me in becoming the professional software engineer in the field of Database administration and Data Architecture. Cassandra NoSQL does not have steep curves, it is always on the top of the technologies from the start (Poojary, 2016, para. 4).

This paper will help me out to obtain training, education, skill and knowledge requirements needed for employment. The research will collect data from experts in the field, scholarly articles and having proper training from the professionals to understand the basic needs of this technology to increase my scope of vision towards NoSQL.

Methodology

Action Research (AR)

Action research is either examine started to solve a quick issue or an intelligent procedure of dynamic critical thinking driven by people working with others and groups or as a major aspect of a group of practices to enhance the way they address issues and take care of issues (Sagor, 2000).

There are two types of action research.

1. Participatory action research

2. Practical action research

Action research techniques gives the reason for existing is to solve a specific issue and to deliver rules for best practice. Action research includes effectively taking part in a change circumstance regularly by means of a current association while at the same time directing exploration (Sagor, 2000).

Figure: 1- Action Research Process (Burns, 2014)

Action research can likewise be embraced by larger organizations or establishments helped or guided by expert analysts with the point of enhancing their procedures practices and learning of the situations inside which they practice as planners and stakeholder’s researchers work with others to propose another game-plan to help their group enhance its work practice.

AR is a process of empowering those on the front lines of action to conduct research into their own practices, rather than relying on and more importantly being subject to research findings of outsiders. Imagine we are working at a large organization. Lately, staff turnover has been at an all-times high and memberships sale have been dropping. As well, Customer complaints about many aspects of the business have been increasing (Sagor, 2000, para. 3).

AR Process

Action research cycle very common model is on constructive this is that we collectively reflect on the issue that we are engaging with what's going on? what knowledge do we have? what is our personal knowledge? what if the external knowledge? we create some sort of plan of action in relationship to the issue because we are looking for solutions and we are looking to learn from the solutions that we generate, we observe, we act on that created plan and then we

observe what happens (Burns, 2014).

Figure: 2 – Stages of Action Research Process

Once we know what's happened then we reflect again in our work added a 5Th element to that which is an around series of change.

Figure: 3 – Developed Action Research Process (Burns, 2014)

In effect where you start without reflection which is an analysis of our situation then you generate there is a change what do we actually think is going on here if we do. We are going to do is what happened to the research is in now let's start from the issue we got.

What happens is we can learn from that, we need to walk how do we need to recalibrate that we need to analyze the situation again and how did that impact on the bigger situation. We need to generate new theories have changed so the cycle of research goes around and round is not the one static process that take a step back and that mean lots of ways to cut different forms of action research (Burns, 2014)

Why Action Research

For every work or a project or a research needs a plan or process to follow to over the problems or the issues we face in our research, so the action research has the genuine built up process that helps in my project research to develop my NoSQL developer skills and we can easily identify the problem when it arises. Professional work, then again, is relied upon the mind with which we think and nonroutine, and will for the most part require cooperation among experts to deliver good outcomes. With the exploring information base on educating and learning and the increased requests on engineers to help all the organizations to accomplish and solving the complicated problems, the deficiency of the hands-on model for learning this technology is ending up noticeably much clearer.

References

Burns, A & Hooton, N. H (2016). Using action research to explore technology in language

teaching: international perspectives. Aston University. Retrieved from https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/sites/teacheng/files/28313%20ELTRA%20Report%20WEB.PDF

Edureka (2014, Jun 30). Why Learn Cassandra with Hadoop? Big Data NoSQL. Retrieved from

https://www.edureka.co/blog/why-learn-cassandra-with-hadoop/

Kurt Lewin, "Action Research and Minority Problems," Journal of Social Issues 2 (1946): 34-46.

Retrieved from http://bscw.wineme.fb5.uni-siegen.de/pub/nj_bscw.cgi/d759359/5_1_ActionResearchandMinortyProblems.pdf

Poojary, P. (2016, May 31). Apache Cassandra Career Opportunities: How to Bag Top

Cassandra NoSQL jobs. Big Data NoSQL. Retrieved from https://www.edureka.co/blog/apache-cassandra-career-opportunities

Sagor, R. (2000). Guiding School Improvement with Action Research. Ascd publications.

Retrieved from http://www.ascd.org/publications/books/100047/chapters/What-Is-Action-Research%C2%A2.aspx

Vishwakarma, R. (2017, Apr 10). Apache Cassandra: The NoSQL Scalable Database.

Pressreader.com. Retrieved from http://www.pressreader.com/india/opensource-for-you/20170410/282604557690924

What is Apache Cassandra? Datastax Academy. Retrieved from

https://academy.datastax.com/planet-cassandra/what-is-apache-cassandra