Cassandra or most NoSQL databases seem to require a lot more internals knowledge than what a development or an ops team would have. Most sysops teams have a cadre of certified DBAs and administrators and they get on by without any surprises. The one thing Oracle got right was their certification program which ensures there are no gotchas -- most DBA can deliver smooth operations. I guess it is because these NOSQL products are relatively new, they require only ninja level experts to fiddle with the controls.
I would be interested in hearing more from someone who has use a third party managed cassandra service like Google' casandra product https://cloud.google.com/solutions/cassandra/. Did you still deep internal knowledge to use Cassandra ? This is important to know for me because my organization will not have the resources to manage Cassandra clusters but we need a Cassandra like store.
On the other hand, if you tried to fit the article's use case -- at that scale -- into something like PostgreSQL you would still have to start learning the internals.
I think the article author's problem as that they assumed Cassandra would be similar to the technology they were already familiar with, which was not the case; it's different in so many areas, especially with regard to its performance profile, and to someone used to relational databases it's outright alien.
At the scale they're describing, they do exceed the threshold point at which one has to learn the internals of the technology. In engineering, scale is everything. Riding a bicycle doesn't require that you know how bicycles work, but sending a rocket to the moon demands a lot of knowledge about a wide range of subjects.
Google doesn't offer a managed cassandra, rather a manager Bigtable with the HBase Api. But we run a huge Cassandra install in multi dacenters on GCP. And we're good. And yes it requires you to understand distributed storage systems, and the some of Cassandra internals.
Comments
Cassandra or most NoSQL databases seem to require a lot more internals knowledge than what a development or an ops team would have. Most sysops teams have a cadre of certified DBAs and administrators and they get on by without any surprises. The one thing Oracle got right was their certification program which ensures there are no gotchas -- most DBA can deliver smooth operations. I guess it is because these NOSQL products are relatively new, they require only ninja level experts to fiddle with the controls.
I would be interested in hearing more from someone who has use a third party managed cassandra service like Google' casandra product https://cloud.google.com/solutions/cassandra/. Did you still deep internal knowledge to use Cassandra ? This is important to know for me because my organization will not have the resources to manage Cassandra clusters but we need a Cassandra like store.
On the other hand, if you tried to fit the article's use case -- at that scale -- into something like PostgreSQL you would still have to start learning the internals.
I think the article author's problem as that they assumed Cassandra would be similar to the technology they were already familiar with, which was not the case; it's different in so many areas, especially with regard to its performance profile, and to someone used to relational databases it's outright alien.
At the scale they're describing, they do exceed the threshold point at which one has to learn the internals of the technology. In engineering, scale is everything. Riding a bicycle doesn't require that you know how bicycles work, but sending a rocket to the moon demands a lot of knowledge about a wide range of subjects.
Google doesn't offer a managed cassandra, rather a manager Bigtable with the HBase Api. But we run a huge Cassandra install in multi dacenters on GCP. And we're good. And yes it requires you to understand distributed storage systems, and the some of Cassandra internals.
That's not managed. They install it, but not manage it.