Also: * you should Google "eventual consistency" to learn about the strengths and weaknesses of that.
On Mon, May 10, 2010 at 11:22 AM, Paul Prescod <p...@prescod.net> wrote: > This is a very, very big topic. For the most part, the issues are > covered in the various SQL versus NoSQL debates all over the Internet. > For example: > > * Cassandra and its NoSQL siblings have no concept of an in-database "join" > > * Cassandra and its NoSQL siblings do not allow you to update > multiple "tables" in a single transactions > > * Cassandra's API is specific to it, and not portable to any other data store > > * Cassandra currently has simplistic facilities to deal with various > kinds of conflicting write. > > * Cassandra is strongly optimized for multiple machine distributions, > whereas relational databases tend to be optimized for a single > powerful machine. > > * Cassandra and its siblings are weak at ad hoc queries on tables > that you did not think to index in advance > > On Mon, May 10, 2010 at 11:06 AM, Peter Hsu <pe...@motivecast.com> wrote: >> I've seen a lot of threads and posts about why Cassandra is great. I'm >> fairly sold on the features, and the few big deployments on Cassandra give >> it a lot of credibility. >> >> However, I don't believe in magic bullets, so I really want to understand >> the potential downsides of Cassandra. Right now, I don't really have a clue >> as to what Cassandra is bad at. I took a look at >> http://wiki.apache.org/cassandra/CassandraLimitations which is helpful, but >> doesn't characterize its weaknesses in ways that I can really comprehend >> until I've actually used Cassandra and understand some of the internals. It >> seems that the community would benefit from being able to answer some of >> these questions in terms of real world use cases. >> >> My main questions: >> * Are there designs in which a SQL database out-performs or out-scales >> Cassandra? >> * Is there a pros vs cons page of Cassandra against an open source SQL >> database (MySQL or Postgres)? >> >> I do plan on attending the training session next Friday in Palo Alto, but >> it'd be great if I had some more food for thought before I attend. >> >> >
