DataStax

Discussion of DataStax — formerly known as Riptano — a company founded to commercialize Cassandra.

December 8, 2013

DataStax/Cassandra update

Cassandra’s reputation in many quarters is:

This has led competitors to use, and get away with, sales claims along the lines of “Well, if you really need geo-distribution and can’t wait for us to catch up — which we soon will! — you should use Cassandra. But otherwise, there are better choices.”

My friends at DataStax, naturally, don’t think that’s quite fair. And so I invited them — specifically Billy Bosworth and Patrick McFadin — to educate me. Here are some highlights of that exercise.

DataStax and Cassandra have some very impressive accounts, which don’t necessarily revolve around geo-distribution. Netflix, probably the flagship Cassandra user — since Cassandra inventor Facebook adopted HBase instead — actually hasn’t been using the geo-distribution feature. Confidential accounts include:

DataStax and Cassandra won’t necessarily win customer-brag wars versus MongoDB, Couchbase, or even HBase, but at least they’re strongly in the competition.

DataStax claims that simplicity is now a strength. There are two main parts to that surprising assertion. Read more

November 8, 2013

Comments on the 2013 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Operational Database Management Systems

The 2013 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Operational Database Management Systems is out. “Operational” seems to be Gartner’s term for what I call short-request, in each case the point being that OLTP (OnLine Transaction Processing) is a dubious term when systems omit strict consistency, and when even strictly consistent systems may lack full transactional semantics. As is usually the case with Gartner Magic Quadrants:

Anyhow:  Read more

January 5, 2013

NewSQL thoughts

I plan to write about several NewSQL vendors soon, but first here’s an overview post. Like “NoSQL”, the term “NewSQL” has an identifiable, recent coiner — Matt Aslett in 2011 — yet a somewhat fluid meaning. Wikipedia suggests that NewSQL comprises three things:

I think that’s a pretty good working definition, and will likely remain one unless or until:

To date, NewSQL adoption has been limited.

That said, the problem may lie more on the supply side than in demand. Developing a competitive SQL DBMS turns out to be harder than developing something in the NoSQL state of the art.

Read more

March 31, 2012

Our clients, and where they are located

From time to time, I disclose our vendor client lists. Another iteration is below, the first since a little over a year ago. To be clear:

For reasons explained below, I’ll group the clients geographically. Obviously, companies often have multiple locations, but this is approximately how it works from the standpoint of their interactions with me. Read more

March 27, 2012

DataStax Enterprise and Cassandra revisited

My last post about DataStax Enterprise and Cassandra didn’t go so well. As follow-up, I chatted for two hours with Rick Branson and Billy Bosworth of DataStax. Hopefully I can do better this time around.

For starters, let me say there are three kinds of data management nodes in DataStax Enterprise:

Cassandra, Solr, Lucene, and Hadoop are all Apache projects.

If we look at this from the standpoint of DML (Data Manipulation Language) and data access APIs:

In addition, it is sometimes recommended that you use “in-entity caching”, where an entire data structure (e.g. in JSON) winds up in a single Cassandra column.

The two main ways to get direct SQL* access to data in DataStax Enterprise are:

*or very SQL-like, depending on how you view things

Before going further, let’s recall some Cassandra basics: Read more

March 21, 2012

DataStax Enterprise 2.0

Edit: Multiple errors in the post below have been corrected in a follow-on post about DataStax Enterprise and Cassandra.

My client DataStax is announcing DataStax Enterprise 2.0. The big point of the release is that there’s a bunch of stuff integrated together, including at least:

DataStax stresses that all this runs on the same cluster, with the same administrative tools and so on. For example, on a single cluster:

Read more

February 1, 2012

Couchbase update

I checked in with James Phillips for a Couchbase update, and I understand better what’s going on. In particular:

Read more

September 26, 2011

Highlights of a busy news week

I put up 14 posts over the past week, so perhaps you haven’t had a chance yet to read them all. 🙂 Highlights included:

Most of the posts, however, were reactions to news events. In particular:

September 22, 2011

DataStax pivots back to its original strategy

The DataStax and Cassandra stories are somewhat confusing. Unfortunately, DataStax chose to clarify them in what has turned out to be a crazy news week. I’m going to use this post just to report on the status of the DataStax product line, without going into any analysis beyond that.

Read more

September 8, 2011

Aster Data business trends

Last month, I reviewed with the Aster Data folks which markets they were targeting and selling into, subsequent to acquisition by their new orange overlords. The answers aren’t what they used to be. Aster no longer focuses much on what it used to call frontline (i.e., low-latency, operational) applications; those are of course a key strength for Teradata. Rather, Aster focuses on investigative analytics — they’ve long endorsed my use of the term — and on the batch run/scoring kinds of applications that inform operational systems.

Read more

← Previous PageNext Page →

Feed: DBMS (database management system), DW (data warehousing), BI (business intelligence), and analytics technology Subscribe to the Monash Research feed via RSS or email:

Login

Search our blogs and white papers

Monash Research blogs

User consulting

Building a short list? Refining your strategic plan? We can help.

Vendor advisory

We tell vendors what's happening -- and, more important, what they should do about it.

Monash Research highlights

Learn about white papers, webcasts, and blog highlights, by RSS or email.