Astra DB from DataStax is a vector database for developers that need to get accurate Generative AI applications into production, fast.
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SingleStore
Score 8.2 out of 10
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SingleStore aims to enable organizations to scale from one to one million customers, handling SQL, JSON, full text and vector workloads in one unified platform.
We've been super happy with Astra DB. It's been extremely well-suited for our vector search needs as described in previous responses. With Astra DB’s high-performance vector search, Maester’s AI dynamically optimizes responses in real-time, adapting to new user interactions without requiring costly retraining cycles.
Good for Applications needing instant insights on large, streaming datasets. Applications processing continuous data streams with low latency. When a multi-cloud, high-availability database is required When NOT to Use Small-scale applications with limited budgets Projects that do not require real-time analytics or distributed scaling Teams without experience in distributed databases and HTAP architectures.
We need to be able to process a lot of data (our biggest clients process hundreds of milions of transactions every month). However, it is not only the amount of data, it is also an unpredictable patterns with spikes occuring at different points of time - something athat Astra is great at.
Our processing needs to be extremaly fast. Some of our clients use our enrichment in a synchronous way, meaning that any delay in processing is holding up the whole transaction lifecycle and can have a major impact on the client. Astra is very fast.
A close collaboration with GCP makes our life very easy. All of our technology sits in Google Cloud, so having Astra in there makes it a no-brainer solution for us.
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.
It does not release a patch to have back porting; it just releases a new version and stops support; it's difficult to keep up to that pace.
Support engineers lack expertise, but they seem to be improving organically.
Lacks enterprise CDC capability: Change data capture (CDC) is a process that tracks and records changes made to data in a database and then delivers those changes to other systems in real time.
For enterprise-level backup & restore capability, we had to implement our model via Velero snapshot backup.
[Until it is] supported on AWS ECS containers, I will reserve a higher rating for SingleStore. Right now it works well on EC2 and serves our current purpose, [but] would look forward to seeing SingleStore respond to our urge of feature in a shorter time period with high quality and security.
SingleStore excels in real-time analytics and low-latency transactions, making it ideal for operational analytics and mixed workloads. Snowflake shines in batch analytics and data warehousing with strong scalability for large datasets. SingleStore offers faster data ingestion and query execution for real-time use cases, while Snowflake is better for complex analytical queries on historical data.
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.
The support deep dives into our most complexed queries and bizarre issues that sometimes only we get comparing to other clients. Our special workload (thousands of Kafka pipelines + high concurrency of queries). The response match to the priority of the request, P1 gets immediate return call. Missing features are treated, they become a client request and being added to the roadmap after internal consideration on all client needs and priority. Bugs are patched quite fast, depends on the impact and feasible temporary workarounds. There is no issue that we haven't got a proper answer, resolution or reasoning
We allowed 2-3 months for a thorough evaluation. We saw pretty quickly that we were likely to pick SingleStore, so we ported some of our stored procedures to SingleStore in order to take a deeper look. Two SingleStore people worked closely with us to ensure that we did not have any blocking problems. It all went remarkably smoothly.
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++
Greenplum is good in handling very large amount of data. Concurrency in Greenplum was a major problem. Features available in SingleStore like Pipelines and in memory features are not available in Greenplum. Gemfire was not scaling well like SingleStore. Support of both Greenplum and Gemfire was not good. Product team did not help us much like the ones in SingleStore who helped us getting started on our first cluster very fast.
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.
As the overall performance and functionality were expanded, we are able to deliver our data much faster than before, which increases the demand for data.
Metadata is available in the platform by default, like metadata on the pipelines. Also, the information schema has lots of metadata, making it easy to load our assets to the data catalog.
