Hacker News Reader

Comment by dschobel | Hacker News Reader

Why do you say that Cassandra is ill-fated?

NoSQL seems to me to be a scene as much driven by hype as logic. (For better or worse, practitioners using and programming NoSQL systems tend to have little understanding of the 30+ years of relevant RDBMS academic literature, and 20+ years of distributed RDBMS academic literature.)

Given that, NoSQL adoption often appears driven by success stories. But Cassandra seems to have the opposite: numerous failure stories. Facebook, Digg, Reddit and a number of others have all tried Cassandra in production, and have either had serious complaints or moved off to either SQL or other solutions like HBase.

Of course, these failure stories are anecdotes, and numerous unrelated factors (like bad interactions between Cassandra and Amazon's EC2) could be at fault. But I'm not sure it matters.

Has anyone on HN had a really good experience with Cassandra? (This may be the wrong thread to ask for obvious reasons.)

Riak users have had quite the opposite results based on talks given at conferences and videos put online. Yammer, Voxer, Formspring, Bump are all riak customers and all have a video out there somewhere talking about how much the like riak. Yes riak and cassandra share a little bit of technology (being dynamo inspired), but most of cassandra woes seem to come from operational difficulties and not the technology theory. Riak has more of a focus on operational friendliness out of the box.

There are videos and talks out there from several customers listed on Basho's site, just take a look.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com