I would start with the scenarios which are well-suited. I can see Antra DB excels at the scalability and global distribution part as with the company's continuously growing size, we need our data to be growing at the same speed, which ASTRA DB largely supports, and if we talk about the less appropriate scenario, I would say when we need to incorporate external tools for the better monitor, it sorts of fails purpose.
Although Google Cloud SQL has room for improvement by addressing a minor lack of features, its features and services keep it high among other SQL database products. It is very fast compared to others. Since it is cloud-based, maintenance is also easier. Integration capabilities are also more than expected.
The support team sometimes requires the escalate button pressed on tickets, to get timely responses. I will say, once the ticket is escalated, action is taken.
They require better documentation on the migration of data. The three primary methods for migrating large data volumes are bulk, Cassandra Data Migrator, and ZDM (Zero Downtime Migration Utility). Over time I have become very familiar will all three of these methods; however, through working with the Services team and the support team, it seemed like we were breaking new ground. I feel if the utilities were better documented and included some examples and/or use cases from large data migrations; this process would have been easier. One lesson learned is you likely need to migrate your application servers to the same cloud provider you host Astra on; otherwise, the latency is too large for latency-sensitive applications.
Basically on personal experience. Google Cloud SQL is an excellent database for a large number of varied use cases. Often the only necessary change is a single line change in a config file and setup some accesses. It is fast enough almost all the time and a breeze to set up. Lack of stored procedures and in TDE encryption is the only reason which it not a 10/10
Their response time is fast, in case you do not contact them during business hours, they give a very good follow-up to your case. They also facilitate video calls if necessary for debugging.
GCP support in general requires a support agreement. For small organizations like us, this is not affordable or reasonable. It would help if Google had a support mechanism for smaller organizations. It was a steep learning curve for us because this was our first entry into the cloud database world. Better documentation also would have helped.
Graph, search, analytics, administration, developer tooling, and monitoring are all incorporated into a single platform by Astra DB. Mongo Db is a self-managed infrastructure. Astra DB has Wide column store and Mongo DB has Document store. The best thing is that Astra DB operates on Java while Mongo DB operates on C++
Google SQL was great as a first SQL provision. It quickly enabled the apps to be built and scaled as needed for a while. It was robust and adaptable as needed and easy to export as needed when ready, depending on growth. Cost-wise, it's a good choice and requires little investment to get going.
We are well aware of the Cassandra architecture and familiar with the open source tooling that Datastax provides the industry (K8sSandra / Stargate) to scale Cassandra on Kubernetes.
Having prior knowledge of Cassandra / Kubernetes means we know that under the hood Astra is built on infinitely scalable technologies. We trust that the foundations that Astra is built on will scale so we know Astra will scale.
The high availability capabilities of Astra DB can assist in reducing downtime, which is crucial for revenue-generating applications.
The developer-friendly features of Astra DB, as well as support for known query languages, can help expedite development, save development time, and minimize labor costs. This can result in a shorter time to market and a higher ROI.
When first migrated to a cloud environment, the Cloud SQL instance had a higher cost than our former MySQL VM instance, but many other infrastructure costs had also been reduced and the total balance of our migration to the cloud was a reduction of 45% of our infrastructure costs.
DB performance has increased and maintenance tasks reduced in a high percentage.
Disaster recovery plans are easier to follow now than before our cloud migration.
