Amazon SimpleDB vs. Apache Cassandra

Well suited for: Games, Chat rooms, real time software like corporate events, marathons and so. Anytime and anywhere you could use a NoSQL DB you should think of SimpleDB.

As an arduous AWS user, Amazon SimpleDB easily integrates with EC2 and other AWS module; and if you are not an AWS user, you also have a fantastic tool that will solve the problem for which you are focused.

Incentivized

Cassandra excels in a broad range of applications -- especially if you understand its data model and write your applications accordingly. It's an excellent choice for time-series data, and a poor choice for application queues. It performs the best if you can simply record history and compute from it, rather than going back and editing or deleting things a lot.

Incentivized

• Flexibility
• Easy to learn and use
• AWS integration

Incentivized

• High Availability - we utilize the data replication features of Cassandra. This enables us to access our data even when several nodes have gone down
• Data Locality - our architecture combines Cassandra storage nodes and computation nodes in the same machine. This enables us to utilize data locality and limit expensive network IO to read data.
• Elasticity - Cassandra is a shared nothing architecture. Nodes can be added very easily and they discover the network topology. As soon as a node has joined the Cassandra ring, the data is redistributed among the existing nodes and streamed to it automatically.

Incentivized

• Non AWS environments
• Strict storage limit (but well we have DynamoDB for storage issues)

Incentivized

• No Ad-Hoc Queries: Cassandra data storage layer is basically a key-value storage system. This means that you must "model" your data around the queries you want to surface, rather than around the structure of the data itself.
• There are no aggregations queries available in Cassandra.
• Not fit for transactional data.

Incentivized

I would recommend Cassandra DB to those who know their use case very well, as well as know how they are going to store and retrieve data. If you need a guarantee in data storage and retrieval, and a DB that can be linearly grown by adding nodes across availability zones and regions, then this is the database you should choose.

Incentivized

It’s great tool but it can be complicated when it comes administration and maintenance.

Incentivized

Sometimes instead giving straight answer, we ‘re getting transfered to talk professional service.

Incentivized

It integrates beautifully with AWS. In some projects we use SimpleDB while we use DynamoDB for others, according to the characteristics of the project. If the infrastructure is AWS, we always think of one of them.

Incentivized

Apache Cassandra has the best of both worlds, it is a Java based NoSQL, linearly scalable, best in class
tunable performance across different workloads, fault tolerant, distributed, masterless, time series database. We have used both Apache HBase and MongoDB for some use cases which were within hadoop setup and JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) document store respectively, but given the overall factors favoring Apache Cassandra, it is a technology choice for multiple platforms!

Incentivized

• Reduced database administration time
• Reduced data model analysis time
• Lower cost of resources in projects in general

Incentivized

• The open source version of Cassandra is only suggested for learning the basic concepts and play with its core features. Unless you really want to invest a lot in your developers and architects knowing every detail of Cassandra, I prefer the DataStax enterprise version. Although the license cost is relatively high, I think they it is worth it. I'm thinking about the support, the monitoring tool OpsCenter, and the integration of Solr and Spark (for data analysis).
• Cassandra didn't fully replace our old and traditional relation database Oracle. In addition, it opens another door for us to deal with some special business use cases that NoSQL database can do better in a more feasible and efficient way.

Incentivized