Overview

The popularity of Apache Cassandra and the applicability of it’s development model has seen it clearly emerge as the leading NoSQL technology for scale, performance and availability. One only needs to survey the ever increasing range of Cassandra-compatible options now available on the market to gain a further proof point to its popularity.

As we get started with 2018, the range of Cassandra-compatible offerings available on the market include:

  • Datastax Enterprise
  • ScyllaDB* (Please note that due to extremely limited customer demand, we no longer support ScyllaDB. Please contact our Sales Team should have you have any further questions.)
  • Yugabyte
  • Azure Cosmos DB

We all know that the database is a key foundational technology for any application. You need to ensure you choose a product that meets the functional requirements of your use case, is robust and scalable, makes efficient use of computing resources and will be usable by your dev team and supportable by your ops team now and into the future.  The selection of the database technology for a new application, therefore, deserves rigorous consideration of your specific requirements.

Approach

This blog post surveys the current state and key considerations for people evaluating these offerings and finishes with an overview of some of in progress development for Apache Cassandra that should ensure it remains the default, and best, the choice for the majority of use cases.

This post provides some high-level considerations that should help you to narrow down contenders for evaluation. For each technology we consider:

  • The breadth of production deployment – How widely is the product used in production?
  • Licensing model – Is the product open source? If so, what open source licensing model is used and what are the implications of that?
  • Strength of community – Is the product dependent on a single vendor for ongoing support or is it backed by a range of invested organisations? Does the breadth of user community allow access to required expertise?
  • Functionality – Does the technology have any particular functional advantages or limitations that stand out for the comparable technologies?
  • Scalability and performance – Has the system demonstrated the ability to operate at scale? Is it able to deliver low latencies and make efficient use of available compute resources?

Datastax Enterprise

Datastax Enterprise (DSE) is a closed source product derived from Apache Cassandra. For core Cassandra features, it is driver level compatible with Apache Cassandra. Online migration from DSE to Apache Cassandra can be achieved with minimal effort where DSE proprietary features have not been used. However, DSE contains a number of extensions that are not included in Apache Cassandra and such as bundling Spark and Solr into the same application and providing customer security and compaction providers.

The breadth of production deployment: DSE has been used in production by many organisations over several years.

Licensing model: DSE is a closed-source, proprietary product derived from open source products. Use of DSE requires payment of a licensing fee to Datastax.

Strength of community: As a proprietary product, support and enhancement of DSE is entirely reliant on Datastax. However, DSE does build on contributions from the communities for the underlying open source products.

Functionality: Functional enhancements in DSE vs the open source products are generally enterprise-specific features (such as LDAP authentication integration), relatively simple integration of the other included products (Spark, Solr) and the entirely proprietary DSE Graph graph database functionality.

Scalability and Performance: In general, DSE performance will be very similar to the underlying open source productions. However, Datastax does claim some proprietary performance improvements.