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Cassandra

Cassandra

Overview

What is Cassandra?

Cassandra is a no-SQL database from Apache.

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Recent Reviews

TrustRadius Insights

Apache Cassandra has gained extensive popularity and usage across various critical use cases and platform solutions in many organizations. …
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Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

Popular Features

View all 7 features
  • Availability (5)
    8.8
    88%
  • Performance (5)
    8.5
    85%
  • Security (5)
    8.0
    80%
  • Concurrency (5)
    7.6
    76%
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Pricing

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What is Cassandra?

Cassandra is a no-SQL database from Apache.

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  • No setup fee

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Product Demos

Presto and Cassandra: Doing SQL and Joins on Cassandra Tables

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CassandraDB Connector Demo | CassandraDB Integration

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Open Source BI Tools and Cassandra

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Spark and Cassandra: Doing SQL and Joins on Cassandra Tables

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Real-time IoT data analytics and visualization with Kaa, Apache Cassandra, and Apache Zeppelin

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Features

NoSQL Databases

NoSQL databases are designed to be used across large distrusted systems. They are notably much more scalable and much faster and handling very large data loads than traditional relational databases.

8
Avg 8.8
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Product Details

Cassandra Technical Details

Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo

Frequently Asked Questions

Cassandra is a no-SQL database from Apache.

Reviewers rate Scalability highest, with a score of 9.5.

The most common users of Cassandra are from Enterprises (1,001+ employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(94)

Community Insights

TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!

Apache Cassandra has gained extensive popularity and usage across various critical use cases and platform solutions in many organizations. Users have found it particularly useful in the tax domain, small businesses, profile platforms, and AB testing platforms. Algorithmic Ads, for example, relies solely on Cassandra for both real-time transactions and analytics.

In terms of implementation, a lightweight Java application serves as the primary means of accessing Cassandra, providing a RESTful web services API for seamless integration with other applications. This API is used internally as well as by customers, making it a central point for integration that includes business logic and data. The outstanding performance, linear scalability, and continuous availability of Cassandra make it a preferred choice among developers when a highly available NoSQL database is required.

Furthermore, Cassandra has proven its capabilities in multiple scenarios. It currently supports an enterprise eCommerce platform, offering excellent performance and acting as a powerful NoSQL database. Additionally, it has been employed to build a fully functional proof of concept for a shipment cloud concept at FedEx. By combining InMemory and NoSQL storage solutions, Cassandra enables unified RESTful-based service that caters to queries for the latest or historical shipment status. Moreover, users have found that Cassandra serves as a reliable backup for the IMDG component in case of a complete crash.

Cassandra's versatility extends to other domains as well. It effectively handles non-standard RDBMS data by providing fast write speeds and suitability for storing flat data. Many organizations leverage its cluster configuration to store personalization data for customers, ensuring up-to-date information with low latency. Cassandra also plays a crucial role in storing data in JSON format, allowing for efficient data storage and retrieval.

Moreover, Cassandra seamlessly integrates with various systems to provide distributed system logic. For instance, it is a core component of the HyperStore S3-compatible object storage system and collaborates with other Java servers to create scalable and fault-tolerant architectures.

Additionally, Cassandra has proven its efficiency in academic projects related to cloud computing and Salesforce, outperforming traditional RDBMS solutions. Prominent companies like Facebook and Uber rely on Cassandra for their real-time running apps due to its improved performance capabilities.

Although users have encountered challenges with the documentation, they still highly recommend using Cassandra for its scalability and faster request processing. Overall, Cassandra is a valuable asset for geographically dispersed architectures, offering availability, consistency, data distribution across multiple machines, and expandability on demand.

Greatest community and adoption: The Java-based NoSQL database has garnered a strong following with its greatest community and adoption. Many users have found it to be a highly popular choice among developers, benefiting from the extensive support and resources available.

Excellent integration with Apache Hadoop, Apache Spark, and Solr: Reviewers have consistently praised the database for its excellent integration capabilities with Apache Hadoop, Apache Spark, and Solr. This seamless integration provides a robust ecosystem of tools that enable efficient unit tests and stress testing.

Best-in-class performance across various workloads: Users have consistently highlighted the exceptional performance of this database across various read/write/mixed workloads. Its ability to provide low latency and high throughput has been widely appreciated by customers who require fast data retrieval and processing.

Missing Features: Some users have expressed that Apache Cassandra lacks certain functionalities, such as security and advanced tools like OpsCenter. They believe these features should be included in the open source version.

Challenging Data Modeling: Users with a background in relational databases may find it challenging to understand and work with NoSQL databases like Cassandra. They mention that data modeling needs to revolve around queries rather than the data structure.

Operational Challenges: Managing a large Cassandra cluster, even with the DataStax Enterprise Version, can pose challenges for maintenance teams due to frequent version upgrades and auto-repair. Users express the need for improved operational tools and continued enhancements to handle large clusters and massive amounts of data effectively.

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-15 of 15)
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Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
DynamoDB is good and is also a truly global database as a service on AWS. However, if your organization is not using AWS, then Cassandra will provide a highly scalable and tuneable, consistent database.
Cassandra is also fault-tolerant and good for replication across multiple data centers, which you get in DynamoDB as well.
Dhruba Jyoti Nag | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Cassandra has its own use case. It performs very well as a data store. Data can be written to it at a high rate. It cannot be compared to traditional RDBMS like Oracle, because they all have their own usage. Even MongoDB, which is somewhat similar, cannot be stacked up against Cassandra since it again has its own advantages.
yixiang Shan | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
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
September 27, 2017

Cassandra Usage and Needs

Ravi Reddy | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Technology selection should be done based on the need and not based on buzz words in the market (google searching). If your data need flat file approach and more searchable based on index and partition keys, then it's better to go for Cassandra. Cassandra is a better choice compared with HBase because Cassandra has a lot of API's ready and available for map reducing queries (like materialized queries). Cassandra uses ring architecture approach, there is no master-slave approach (like HBase). If data published on of the node the data will get synced with other nodes in the ring architecture when compared to HBase which has a dedicated master node to orchestrate the data into its slaves.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Cassandra is the only NoSQL database I have extensive experience with. In terms of other open source database solutions, I can say that I like Cassandra as much or equally as traditional Oracle MySQL, and a lot more than PostgresSQL. The decision to use Cassandra was driven by the ability for fast read and writes, as well as fault tolerance by having multiple rings in a cluster which shard data to each other in near real time.
Abdel Kamel | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Couchbase Server
Cassandra does one thing very well. It's able to collect any type of metrics and analytics and store them at very fast speeds. But when it comes to reading the data, there are minor performance issues. That's when other databases such as couchdb or couchbase come in. They can do just the opposite very well. In couchbase it can read data very fast but writing data is a bit costly.
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized

These are the features which makes Cassandra different from others:

  • Cassandra is a distributed datastore, with a built-in coordinator. This means that requests are intelligently forwarded to the correct node.
  • It is generally very fast, and especially shines with write heavy workflows.
  • It scales linearly. If you double the nodes, you’ll double your throughput.
  • Embraces eventual consistency.
  • Masterless replication across data centers means that your data is always accessible.
Rekha Joshi | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
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!
David Prinzing | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Four years ago, I needed to choose a web-scale database. Having used relational databases for years (PostgreSQL is my favorite), I needed something that could perform well at scale with no downtime. I considered VoltDB for its in-memory speed, but it's limited in scale. I considered MongoDB as a popular NoSQL alternative, but preferred Cassandra's performance and peer-to-peer architecture. Riak was attractive because it was also derived from Amazon's pioneering research paper in 2007, but it's a key-value store, and I preferred Cassandra's columnar data model. I considered HBase as a prominent member of the Hadoop family of projects, but read in various blog posts that Cassandra outperformed it, especially when handling lots of small transactions. I also considered Amazon's DynamoDB (especially since we run our applications on AWS), but decided against it because of the vendor lock-in. I can run Cassandra anywhere. I love the performance, scalability, availability, and ease of operation, and I've never looked back.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We also evaluated mySQL and mongoDB. Both of them have their strengths and weaknesses but they are less suited for storing massive amounts of time series data. In addition, they are not elastic by nature and we required a "future-proof" solution as it was difficult to estimate how much data we would need to store.
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