California DOJ Stop Data Collection DataStax Architecture and Production Readiness Review

The California Department of Justice (DOJ) is a statewide investigative law enforcement agency and legal department of the California executive branch under the elected leadership of the California Attorney General (AG) which carries out complex criminal and civil investigations, prosecutions, and other legal services throughout the US state of California.

The California DOJ chose DataStax Enterprise Cassandra to be a scalable data storage platform for its Stop Data Collection system, which was developed to meet the requirements of the California Racial and Identity Profiling Act (RIPA) of 2015 (AB 953).

DataStax brought RhinoSource onsite to the California DOJ to review the DataStax Enterprise system architecture, network, security, expected workloads, data models, code, disaster recovery and operational procedures to help the DoJ team accelerate the development and prepare for the release of the RIPA Stop Data Collection platform.

After a deep dive into the DOJ architecture, data model and code, RhinoSource made recommendations to improve cluster and query performance and addressed tombstone issues discovered in some of the production tables.

RhinoSource also provided guidance and best practices to the California DOJ team for using OpsCenter to manage and monitor DataStax Enterprise clusters, including the configuration of backup & recovery and the ongoing cluster repair process.

Finally, RhinoSource provided examples of how to use Solr and Spark Analytics to improve application response times, recommended a process for testing cluster tuning changes and provided a role-based training plan for DoJ team members to improve their working DataStax knowledge.