Can someone explain how MapReduce works with Cassandra .6? I\'ve read through the word count example, but I don\'t quite follow what\'s happening on the Cassandra end vs. the \"
From what I've heard (and from here), the way that a developer writes a MapReduce program that uses Cassandra as the data source is as follows. You write a regular MapReduce program (the example you linked to is for the pure-Java version) and the jars that are now available provide a CustomInputFormat that allows the input source to be Cassandra (instead of the default, which is Hadoop).
If you're using Pycassa I'd say you're out of luck until either (1) the maintainer of that project adds support for MapReduce or (2) you throw some Python functions together that write up a Java MapReduce program and run it. The latter is definitely a bit of a hack but would get you up and going.