I've used various databases in production for over 10 years. Each has
strengths and weaknesses.
I ran Cassandra for just shy of 2 years in production as part of both
development teams and operations, and I only hit 1 serious problem
that Rob mentioned. Ideally C* would have guarded against it, but it
did not. I did not have any downtime as a result, however. For those
curious, I tried to add 1.2 nodes to a 1.1 cluster. Aside from that,
I actually did find Cassandra simple to operate & manage.
I used Cassandra as more of a general purpose database. I was willing
to give up some query flexibility in favor of high availability and
multi dc support. There were times we needed to add more servers to
deal with additional load, it handled it perfectly.
For me it wasn't such a big problem, there's always optimizations that
need to be made no matter what DB you use.
Disclaimer: I now work for Datastax.
On Tue, Jul 8, 2014 at 5:51 PM, Robert Coli <rc...@eventbrite.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 4, 2014 at 2:10 PM, DuyHai Doan <doanduy...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> c. operational simplicity due to master-less architecture. This feature
>> is, although quite transparent for developers, is a key selling point.
>> Having suffered when installing manually a Hadoop cluster, I happen to love
>> the deployment simplicity of C*, only one process per node, no moving parts.
>
>
> Asserting that Cassandra, as a fully functioning production system, is
> currently easier to operate than RDBMS is just false. It is still false even
> if we ignore the availability of experienced RDBMS operators and decades of
> RDBMS operational best practice.
>
> The quality of software engineering practice in RDBMS land also most
> assuredly results in a more easily operable system in many, many use cases.
> Yes, Cassandra is more tolerant to individual node failures. This turns out
> to not matter as much in terms of "operability" as non-operators appear to
> think it does. Very trivial operational activities ("create a new
> columnfamily" or "replace a failed node") are subject to failure mode edge
> cases which often are not resolvable without brute force methods.
>
> I am unable to get my head around the oft-heard marketing assertion that a
> data-store in which such common activities are not bulletproof is capable of
> being than better to operate than the RDBMS status quo. The production
> operators I know also do not agree that Cassandra is simple to operate.
>
> All the above aside, I continue to maintain that Cassandra is the best at
> being the type of thing that it is. If you have a need to horizontally scale
> a use case that is well suited for its strength and poorly suited for RDBMS,
> you should use it. Far fewer people actually have this sort of case than
> think they do.
>
> =Rob
--
Jon Haddad
http://www.rustyrazorblade.com
skype: rustyrazorblade
