

Cassandra: Fact vs fiction - ropiku
http://spyced.blogspot.com/2010/04/cassandra-fact-vs-fiction.html

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didip
Based on our usage, I think Thrift is the Achilles' heel for Cassandra. Some
of Trift problems that we've seen:

* simple port scan can crash Thrift.

* Malform data can crash Thrift.

* inserting data too fast can crash Thrift.

Any of the 3 above cause NoServersAvailable error.

That said, do you guys have road-map for replacing Thrift? Apache Avro
perhaps? Are there anyone actually happy with Thrift (besides Facebook)?

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jamie
This is in the Summer Of Code roadmap:

[http://spyced.blogspot.com/2010/03/cassandra-in-google-
summe...](http://spyced.blogspot.com/2010/03/cassandra-in-google-summer-of-
code-2010.html)

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kunley
Yeah I like this guy's tech-stuff-plus-marketing style, still it would be more
honest to at least mention points where Cassandra has its rough edges (and it
has quite amount of them)

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jbellis
This isn't "intro to cassandra 101," this is just fud busting.

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chime
Maybe off-topic but does anyone know of a Cassandra hosting service? I'd love
to try out Cassandra and hopefully put it to production use but I'd rather not
deal with managing the servers.

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rbanffy
I don't know about putting into production, but it took me a couple minutes to
get a 4-node cluster as virtual servers under Debian and OpenVZ. It's very,
very easy.

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earle
Seems pretty biased. What about the flip side of this article?

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justinsb
Clever marketing: include the objections which are false, ignore those are
true.

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pquerna
what objections are true?

(i've not seen them raised anywhere?)

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justinsb
I meant this comment in a positive way: I genuinely think this is smart
marketing.

I think the real objections would be things like (and I'm not necessarily
saying these are true/false, just that they're the ones that people should
really be thinking about):

* Are NoSQL databases the object databases of the modern era?

* Is our pain big enough that we're willing to be a guinea pig for any new technology?

* How will making this technology choice impact our future ability to hire and to work with future technologies?

* Is this the right time to adopt a new database, or will the world be so different in 3 months that we should limp along until then?

From my viewpoint (@ FathomDB), that last point is the most interesting. We're
seeing the start of NoSQL convergence; I expect both rapid development and
serious teething issues. We see FathomDB & VoltDB announcing early
availability of scalable relational databases. Rackspace hired the core of the
Drizzle team, so this project will likely start to bear more fruit. To borrow
from the wife-selection problem, it feels like immediately getting married to
the first attractive person you meet on your first day at college, when
there's a freshman mixer that evening.

~~~
skorgu
None of these can be definitively affirmed or rejected by facts.

They're interesting questions but they're either unanswerable (time, oodb) or
entirely application dependent (pain, hiring).

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Semiapies
Nor are they "objections".

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justinsb
They're certainly fairly big reasons not to use Cassandra, and as such I'd put
them in the objections bucket. If you're objecting to the fact that I phrased
them as questions, just pretend we're on Jeopardy :-)

~~~
jbooth
No they're not, a "big reason not to use Cassandra" would be "it has critical
bug X" or "it's missing critical feature Y".

