Apache Cassandra vs. Apache Hadoop vs. PostgreSQL

Apache Cassandra is a NoSQL database and well suited where you need highly available, linearly scalable, tunable consistency and high performance across varying workloads. It has worked well for our use cases, and I shared my experiences to use it effectively at the last Cassandra summit! http://bit.ly/1Ok56TK It is a NoSQL database, finally you can tune it to be strongly consistent and successfully use it as such. However those are not usual patterns, as you negotiate on latency. It works well if you require that. If your use case needs strongly consistent environments with semantics of a relational database or if the use case needs a data warehouse, or if you need NoSQL with ACID transactions, Apache Cassandra may not be the optimum choice.

Incentivized

Altogether, I want to say that Apache Hadoop is well-suited to a larger and unstructured data flow like an aggregation of web traffic or even advertising. I think Apache Hadoop is great when you literally have petabytes of data that need to be stored and processed on an ongoing basis. Also, I would recommend that the software should be supplemented with a faster and interactive database for a better querying service. Lastly, it's very cost-effective so it is good to give it a shot before coming to any conclusion.

Incentivized

PostgreSQL is best used for structured data, and best when following relational database design principles. I would not use PostgreSQL for large unstructured data such as video, images, sound files, xml documents, web-pages, especially if these files have their own highly variable, internal structure.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Handles large amounts of unstructured data well, for business level purposes
• Is a good catchall because of this design, i.e. what does not fit into our vertical tables fits here.
• Decent for large ETL pipelines and logging free-for-alls because of this, also.

Incentivized

• It works well with external data sources and runs on platforms with stable performance.
• Clients can rest assured that their personal information will be safe and secure.
• Many forums discuss setup and usage, and most are free.
• Adding tooling applications to a computer is unlimited.
• PostgreSQL runs on many OS platforms and supports ANSI SQL, stored procedures, and triggers.

• 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.

Incentivized

• Less organizational support system. Bugs need to be fixed and outside help take a long time to push updates
• Not for small data sets
• Data security needs to be ramped up
• Failure in NameNode has no replication which takes a lot of time to recover

Incentivized

• Clearer indications on what is the query plan, to optimize the query
• More out of the box, Postgres specific, SQL functions
• It would be nice to have a more visual aid of the relationship between all tables, but possibly this depend more on the UI used

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

Hadoop is organization-independent and can be used for various purposes ranging from archiving to reporting and can make use of economic, commodity hardware. There is also a lot of saving in terms of licensing costs - since most of the Hadoop ecosystem is available as open-source and is free

As a needed software for day to day development activities

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

As Hadoop enterprise licensed version is quite fine tuned and easy to use makes it good choice for Hadoop administrators. It’s scalability and integration with Kerberos is good option for authentication and authorisation. installation can be improved. logging can be improved so that it become easier for debugging purposes. parallel processing of data is achieved easily.

Incentivized

Postgresql is the best tool out there for relational data so I have to give it a high rating when it comes to analytics, data availability and consistency, so on and so forth. SQL is also a relatively consistent language so when it comes to building new tables and loading data in from the OLTP database, there are enough tools where we can perform ETL on a scalable basis.

Incentivized

PostgreSQL's availability is top notch. Apart from connection time-out for an idle user, the database is super reliable.

Incentivized

The data queries are relatively quick for a small to medium sized table. With complex joins, and a wide and deep table however, the performance of the query has room for improvement.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

It's a great value for what you pay, and most Data Base Administrators (DBAs) can walk in and use it without substantial training. I tend to dabble on the analyst side, so querying the data I need feels like it can take forever, especially on higher traffic days like Monday.

Incentivized

There are several companies that you can contract for technical support, like EnterpriseDB or Percona, both first level in expertise and commitment to the software.

But we do not have contracts with them, we have done all the way from googling to forums, and never have a problem that we cannot resolve or pass around. And for dozens of projects and more than 15 years now.

Incentivized

Hadoop is a complex topic and best suited for classrom training. Online training are a waste of time and money.

The online training is request based. Had there been recorded videos available online for potential users to benefit from, I could have rated it higher. The online documentation however is very helpful. The online documentation PDF is downloadable and allows users to pace their own learning. With examples and code snippets, the documentation is great starting point.

Incentivized

The online documentation of the PostgreSQL product is elaborate and takes users step by step.

Incentivized

We evaluated MongoDB also, but don't like the single point failure possibility. The HBase coupled us too tightly to the Hadoop world while we prefer more technical flexibility. Also HBase is designed for "cold"/old historical data lake use cases and is not typically used for web and mobile applications due to its performance concern. Cassandra, by contrast, offers the availability and performance necessary for developing highly available applications. Furthermore, the Hadoop technology stack is typically deployed in a single location, while in the big international enterprise context, we demand the feasibility for deployment across countries and continents, hence finally we are favor of Cassandra

Incentivized

Not used any other product than Hadoop and I don't think our company will switch to any other product, as Hadoop is providing excellent results. Our company is growing rapidly, Hadoop helps to keep up our performance and meet customer expectations. We also use HDFS which provides very high bandwidth to support MapReduce workloads.

Incentivized

Although the competition between the different databases is increasingly aggressive in the sense that they provide many improvements, new functionalities, compatibility with complementary components or environments, in some cases it requires that it be followed within the same family of applications that performs the company that develops it and that is not all bad, but being able to adapt or configure different programs, applications or other environments developed by third parties apart is what gives PostgreSQL a certain advantage and this diversification in the components that can be joined with it, is the reason why it is a great option to choose.

Incentivized

The DB is reliable, scalable, easy to use and resolves most DB needs

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• There are many advantages of Hadoop as first it has made the management and processing of extremely colossal data very easy and has simplified the lives of so many people including me.
• Hadoop is quite interesting due to its new and improved features plus innovative functions.

Incentivized

• Easy to administer so our DevOps team has only ever used minimal time to setup, tune, and maintain.
• Easy to interface with so our Engineering team has only ever used minimal time to query or modify the database. Getting the data is straightforward, what we do with it is the bigger concern.
• It's free. You can't beat that.

Incentivized