Cassandra at scale
March 16, 2019

Cassandra at scale

Glen Kim | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Cassandra

It’s one of the database platforms we offer to the development community in our organization. We have various selections when it comes to databases including DB2, SQL Server, Oracle, and hadoop for data warehousing. Cassandra becomes the choice when developers want to use a highly available NoSQL db.

Pros

  • Availability
  • Fast performance
  • Horizontal scalability
  • Memory first
  • Partition based

Cons

  • Dealing with tombstone
  • Maintenance/upgrade
  • Compaction and repair
  • High availability, which makes us use the tool
  • Partition key distribution mechanism is well defined
  • Horizontal scalability when needed for high volume days
  • Complex tombstone management
It was packaged with the vendor product we bought. Also, it’s good for high performance transactional systems. I'm part of our NoSQL team and Cassandra quickly became a favorite for developers with agile teams.
Overall, the product is a little hard to deal with when it comes to upgrading as there are always new versions released every quarter. Also, it’s backup and restore processes are still in their baby steps.
We use it for collecting user preferences on our website which can be quickly reused. It's also well suited for document ID lookup systems. It’s not good for high consistency level of information like account balance in your banking system.

Cassandra Feature Ratings

NoSQL Databases
8.1
Performance
10
Availability
8
Concurrency
8
Security
8
Scalability
9
Data model flexibility
7
Deployment model flexibility
7

Using Cassandra

100 - Uuid lookup for multiple line of business.
Session and cookies management.
Records tracking system.
100 - Java developers, operational suppor team with DBA background. Skills needed to support are dustribued system knowledge, os level administration skills, scripting is a plus and data modeling experiences.
  • Document id lookup system
  • Tracking if internal application usage
  • Session management
  • Fraud Risk system that determines any users might be potential victims
  • Protecting internal uuid exposing to all other systems
  • Document ID lookup system
  • Url smart links
  • Credit reports tracking system
  • Asset management

Evaluating Cassandra and Competitors

Yes - Oracle and it was the decision from vendor
  • Product Usability
  • Product Reputation
  • Prior Experience with the Product
I was not the decision maker in thus process however I like the easy use of OpsCenter .
Include more pilot groups ie developers to try out different features and do more stress testing.

Cassandra Implementation

  • Implemented in-house
  • Third-party professional services
CA and broadcom
Yes - Dev/test/prod and slow rollout when implementing in prod.
  • Too many nodes to handle
  • Upgrade can be difficult when you have too many clusters with too quick changes on versioning

Cassandra Support

Sometimes instead giving straight answer, we ‘re getting transfered to talk professional service.
ProsCons
Quick Resolution
Kept well informed
Immediate help available
Support understands my problem
Support cares about my success
Quick Initial Response
Escalation required
No - Our budget is not ready for this expense.
Yes - They recommended to upgrade to next version.
We have license with Datastax so have not dealt with apache.

Using Cassandra

It’s great tool but it can be complicated when it comes administration and maintenance.
ProsCons
None
None
  • Opscenter
  • Bouncing servers
  • Backup / restore
  • Tombstones
  • Repair process
  • Compaction

Comments

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