For quite sometime I am interested to learn about the NoSQL databases which is predicted to be the next gen thing in the database world.Yesterday was a weekend at home after a month or so and I managed to pick a copy of the book Cassandra: The Definitive Guide from Oreilly in order to get an overview the Cassandra database.This is now made open source by Facebook and converted to an Apache Incubation project.Anyway this is not a discussion about Cassandra database.But the name Cassandra…caught my attention.Greek name? right..I read about in..??

Cassandra is a character from the Greek epic Illiad.She was gifted with exceptional powers to foresee the future and at the same time she had a curse that no one will believe her prophecies.

After the fall of Troy she was abducted by Ajax The Lesser (another term very much familiar to todays Web programmers as AJAX stands for Asynchronous JavaScript & XML) and taken along with Agamemnon and eventually killed.

Now why the Facebook engineers chose the name of this tragic greek character of antiquity for their database is not known to me.
But this is not something very new unique there are several software companies,products and frameworks whose name bears some relationship with Greek mythology.

I did some googling to find out what can be the possible reason behind this. I found the following sites listing the Greek mythological names used in business:

http://thanasis.com/modern/biz.htm

http://www.greek-names.info/companies-with-greek-names/

http://www.ehow.com/info_8122696_products-named-after-greek-mythology.html

The last one tries to provide some reasoning behind these names but not any general explanation. The name of Nike seems to have a very well thought of connection between the business vision and the name.A more detailed explanation is given here:

http://lindaweeks.com/brand_marktg/WK%209%20Case%20Study%20Assign.pdf

But the name of Amazon.com does not seem to have any logical relationship with Greek mythology apart from the word Amazon. The word Amazons was used in Greek mythology for a country of female warriors.However the Jeff Bezos used the name of Amazon after river Amazon in anticipation of huge flow of revenue and online sales.The river Amazon in turn was named after the local word “Amassonna” which meant boat destroyer.

Anyways while searching related to some general for usage of Greek mythological characters I did not came across any complete argument for the same.Only there were some bits and pieces of information as:

http://ca.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20110508194356AADfFi7

To me it seems that Greek mythology, philosophy and culture has a profound influence on the Western culture and tradition.In many languages there are words whose roots can be traced back to some Greek word.In fact this is looked upon as something pristine and of high value.Even a very common who does not very deep understanding of history or mythology have come across the words like Apollo,Mars, Aphrodite or Narcissus.Moreover these words short, crisp, smart and catchy.

Enough digression…now it’s time to get Cassandra up and running..