August 7, 2016

Notes on DataStax and Cassandra

I visited DataStax on my recent trip. That was a tipping point leading to my recent discussions of NoSQL DBAs and misplaced fear of vendor lock-in. But of course I also learned some things about DataStax and Cassandra themselves.

On the customer side:

Customers in large numbers want cloud capabilities, as a potential future if not a current need.

One customer example was a large retailer, who in the past was awful at providing accurate inventory information online, but now uses Cassandra for that. DataStax brags that its queries come back in 20 milliseconds, but that strikes me as a bit beside the point; what really matters is that data accuracy has gone from “batch” to some version of real-time. Also, Microsoft is a DataStax customer, using Cassandra (and Spark) for the Office 365 backend, or at least for the associated analytics.

Per Patrick McFadin, the four biggest things in DataStax Enterprise 5 are:

Some of that terminology is mine, but perhaps my clients at DataStax will adopt it too. 🙂

We didn’t go into as much technical detail as I ordinarily might, but a few notes on that tiered storage/ILM bit are:

DataStax Enterprise 5 also introduced policy-based replication features, not all of which are in open source Cassandra. Data sovereignty/geo-compliance is improved, which is of particular importance in financial services. There’s also hub/spoke replication now, which seems to be of particular value in intermittently-connected use cases. DataStax said the motivating use case in that area was oilfield operations, where presumably there are Cassandra-capable servers at all ends of the wide-area network.

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Comments

2 Responses to “Notes on DataStax and Cassandra”

  1. Notes from a long trip, July 19, 2016 | DBMS 2 : DataBase Management System Services on August 9th, 2016 3:52 am

    […] Ditto DataStax. […]

  2. Crayon Shin-chan on August 15th, 2016 6:28 pm

    “Also, Microsoft is a DataStax customer, ”

    I remember Microsoft used to run their SAP on Oracle, I wonder if they still do.

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