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A database easy enough for novices, but seasoned for masters
March 20, 2023

A database easy enough for novices, but seasoned for masters

Rahul Singh | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Astra DB

At at our clients we use it to reduce overhead labor costs related to managing servers and APIs. It’s a good replacement for on premise / self managed Cassandra only work loads but also allows new use cases with GraphQL/REST end points. Some of the specific use cases are for clients running global multi tenant SaaS applications that have several regions and uses around the world. With Astra the management of infrastructure becomes a moot point.

Internally we do a lot of R&D for tools that we create for our clients and also to prototype new applications. With AstraDB it’s easy to start a project and expect that later it will scale and perform as needed without having to worry about migration to another database.

  • Ready to go API in the form of REST/GraphQL/Document
  • Transactional access with CQL / Analytical access via Spark
  • Ability to automate with Devops tooling
  • UI for Modeling Tables / Editing Data
  • Low code data imports from external sources
  • NoCode / Lowcode integration to Zapier / Make
  • Easy to scale without upfront investment
  • Easy to iterate on ideas for R&D to Production
  • DBAs can focus on helping users model data / optimize data ops rather than managing servers
We ask anyone who is learning Cassandra to start with Astra. We publish many Gitpod / open source scenarios for our team members and clients to work with Astra as a starting point for different types of tasks such as Stream processing, data ops, ETL/ELT.

Having the ability to get people started without having to wait on anyone is a game changer. Additionally the team can be confident that the system they design can scale later when needed.
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.
We know Astra is built on Cassandra / Kubernetes / Stargate and can work on any cloud. The competitors we reviewed are cloud specific and create a lock in. We also have the option to run Cassandra / Stargate ourselves if we wanted to. The competitors don’t give that option.

Do you think Astra DB delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Astra DB's feature set?

Yes

Did Astra DB live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Astra DB go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Astra DB again?

Yes

Astra is great for storing and retrieving information that is coming from users, APIs, “things”. It’s both a transactional data store and a “cache” replacement because of its scale and speed. It’s also a great starting point to build APIs that don’t need immediate business logic because tables automatically have APIs available.

It is not for databases that require Joins or analytics. Though joins and aggregate operations can be done in SparkSQL or Presto / Trino it is not going to be as fast. It is not for that. There are better relational databases for that.

If there’s a need to store and retrieve data for tens of thousands of users / systems (or more) simultaneously this is a must since relational databases can become prohibitively expensive.