Amazon DynamoDB vs Cassandra

• It's very easy to get started, creating a table with a partition/sort key and you're on your way.
• You can scale up and down your read/write IO as needed.
• You can store structured and unstructured data.
• It works great with Web Development as it's JSON based.

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• Continuous availability: as a fully distributed database (no master nodes), we can update nodes with rolling restarts and accommodate minor outages without impacting our customer services.
• Linear scalability: for every unit of compute that you add, you get an equivalent unit of capacity. The same application can scale from a single developer's laptop to a web-scale service with billions of rows in a table.
• Amazing performance: if you design your data model correctly, bearing in mind the queries you need to answer, you can get answers in milliseconds.
• Time-series data: Cassandra excels at recording, processing, and retrieving time-series data. It's a simple matter to version everything and simply record what happens, rather than going back and editing things. Then, you can compute things from the recorded history.

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• Complex searching (no support for case-insensitive or full-text search).
• Only supports up to two-key indexes.
• Requires choosing the indexes up-front when doing searches.
• Does not have an SQL compatible query front-end.
• No join-table support (requires putting all data into one table).

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• Cassandra runs on the JVM and therefor may require a lot of GC tuning for read/write intensive applications.
• Requires manual periodic maintenance - for example it is recommended to run a cleanup on a regular basis.
• There are a lot of knobs and buttons to configure the system. For many cases the default configuration will be sufficient, but if its not - you will need significant ramp up on the inner workings of Cassandra in order to effectively tune it.

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• Since the Amazon manages the instance, the amount of time a developer needs to spend configuring the database is less. For comparison, if we were to manage the same instance manually, we need to set up EC2 instance, install the DB, setup backup scripts, track backup failures, which is a great overhead for the dev. Using DynamoDB this overhead is reduced and hence having a great ROI.
• Great documentation and easy setup makes an easy learning curve to transition to DynamoDB. Only caveat is as with any database, the data structure should be thoroughly analyzed for types of querying because there are limitations with the DynamoDB API.
• Ties very well with rest of the Amazon eco system. Having rest of the applications in Amazon allows managing the application security a breeze.

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• I have no experience with this but from the blogs and news what I believe is that in businesses where there is high demand for scalability, Cassandra is a good choice to go for.
• Since it works on CQL, it is quite familiar with SQL in understanding therefore it does not prevent a new employee to start in learning and having the Cassandra experience at an industrial level.

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