In the world of NoSQL database, there are various platforms vying to position itself to the user as the best choice to handle Big Data.
Often platforms are indigenously developed by organizations to find solutions to internal challenges but rarely do such internal platforms start becoming a global phenomenon! Such is the case of Apache Cassandra.
Here are Top 5 Reasons to learn Cassandra
Reason #1: The Booming Job Market
- In the era of Big Data, there is an increasing need for NoSQL professionals as stated by popular job site Dice.com. Just a simple look at popular job sites will give you a picture. For example, the Number of NoSQL jobs peaked to 2000 in Dice of which Cassandra is frequently mentioned as a Core Skill!
- Adding to that, a recent study in Dice Salary Report 2014 states that the compensation of NoSQL Professionals is at $114,796 and the number is expected to grow exponentially as companies are shifting from traditional database to NoSQL.
Reason #2: Fortune 500 Users
- At a time when the larger production environments have hundreds of Terabytes of Data and clusters of 300+ servers, Cassandra is seeing an increased use given its feature to be open source.
- Just when Facebook joined the Fortune 500 back in 2013, the platform of Cassandra already started doing well. Given that some of the top companies across promising sectors such as Communications, Social Media, Ecommerce and IT are using Cassandra to scale up their technological capabilities.
- Companies such as Comcast, Twitter, Ebay, Walmart & IBM have deployed Cassandra in various parts of their operations based on the nature of their Business to name a few!
Reason #3: Born for Big Data
- Big Data is here to stay and the search for a NoSQL platform to handle Big Data challenges is closing in with the adoption of Cassandra. With loads of data generated right from Smartphone, point of sales, satellites to weather forecasting, NoSQL databases become the need of the hour.
- Cassandra is designed to manage extremely large data sets. With a distributed database, the platform takes care of how data can be accessed. Also it safeguards data loss from cluster node failure via replication.
- Typically organizations look for 4 factors namely ‘High Data Velocity, Data variety, Data volume, Data complexity’ while choosing the best NoSQL database for Big Data.
- Cassandra aces out other platforms over these factors along with providing a unique advantage of highly available service with no single point of failure.
Reason #4: Performance against other NoSQL Variants
- Here is where Cassandra’s features such as continuous availability, high scalability, performance, security, simplicity while lowering costs comes into play. Learn more about Apache Cassandra Advantages
- As a leading platform for in NoSQL, Cassandra edges out other players such as HBase, Redis, MySQL in various benchmarks.
- As per EndPoint, a database and open source consulting company which bench-marked top NoSQL databases used a variety of different workloads in Amazon Web Services EC2 Instances with workloads varying from Read/write combination, Read-mostly workloads, Write-mostly workload and many other others where Cassandra excelled with the quickest operations/sec among all.
Reason #5: Tectonic Shift from Relational to NoSQL
- Many organizations are shifting from NoSQL for RDBMSs where they store their data. For Example Netflix stores 95% of all their data including the entire viewing history of all 36 million of its members in Cassandra and they migrated from Oracle in this process!
- Features like Cassandra’s true write/read anywhere capabilities, with that support in including not only clusters that are single premise in nature but also multiple data centres and availability zones unlike RDBMS’ replication makes it a compelling reason to switch to NoSQL. Often it becomes a challenge to choose the right NoSQL Database.
- Top Companies such of EBay, Adobe, Constant Contact have shifted NoSQL models not out of choice but out of Necessity as their application, uses & data have outgrown the legacy RDBMS model and require a different type of platform.
So if Cassandra is your thing, a little history over the origins of Cassandra can always benefit you!
The Story behind Cassandra
- It comes as no surprise to geeks that the very creator of Cassandra was none other than the social networking giant Facebook which was built of Amazon’s Dynamo & Google’s Big Table. Back in the days when Facebook was figuring out things, it quickly wanted to resolve its Inbox search problem which meant the system was required to handle a very high throughput of billions of writes per day and scale with the number of users. Cassandra handled it.
- The very concept of Cassandra is to have a highly scalable column oriented database to implement appropriate use cases similar to NoSQL (in other words ‘not only SQL’) variants like CouchDB. Cassandra is often seen as the forefront of NoSQL innovation.
Fun fact: The word Cassandra is inspired from a beautiful mystic seer in Greek mythology whose prediction for the future was never believed!
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