Hi Gregori, I'm about to start a new project and I was considering using MongoDB too, but I just couldn't find a nice way to scale it. Seems like for scaling you need to use the same style as MySQL, having master/slaves and replicas, which for us was a deal breaker. We just couldn't see how you would scale MongoDB to support massive databases that you can reach using Cassandra/HBase.
I personally think that's where Cassandra shines and if you don't need that massive scale, then there are a lot nicer solutions out there. How do you scale MongoDB to store massive amounts of data? - Drew On Mar 29, 2011, at 5:11 PM, Gregori Schmidt wrote: > hi, > > After using Cassandra during development for the past 8 months my team and I > made the decision to switch from Cassandra to MongoDB this morning. I > thought I'd share some thoughts on why we did this and where Cassandra might > benefit from improvement. > The API is horrible and it produces pointlessly verbose code in addition to > being utterly confusing. EVERYTHING takes a lot of time to implement with > Cassandra, and to be frank, it is incredibly tiring. For this reason alone I > no longer recommend Cassandra. If you want an example, pick up the O'Reilly > book on Cassandra and look through the examples. Such MASSIVE amounts of > code for doing nearly NOTHING. This is ridiculous. Didn't this strike > anyone else as ridiculous? It should have! > You need to have official client libraries and they need to be programmer > friendly. Yes, I know there are nice people maintaining a plethora of > different libraries, but you need to man up and face reality: the chaos that > is the Cassandra client space is a horrible mess. > It is buggy and the solution seems to be to just go to the next release. And > the next. And the next. Which would be okay if you could upgrade all the > time, but what to do once you hit production? > I would recommend that everyone interested in improving Cassandra take the > day off, download MongoDB and read > https://github.com/karlseguin/the-little-mongodb-book . Then, while you are > downloading, unpacking, looking at what was in the JAR, reading the book and > pawing through the examples: _pay attention_ to the neatness and the > effortlessness the ease with which you can use MongoDB. Then spend the rest > of the day implementing something on top of it to gain some hacking > experience. > > No, really. Do it. This is important. You need to connect with the user > and you need to understand what you ought to be aspiring to. > > In any case, thanks for all the effort that went into Cassandra. I will > check back from time to time and perhaps in a year or so it'll be time to > re-evaluate Cassandra. > > PS: one last thing. It took us less time to rewrite the DB-interface for our > system to MongoDB AND port over our data than it took to write the Cassandra > implementation. > > ~G
