How to Determine if Cassandra is Right for Your Project

Apache Cassandra is an open source distributed database management system. Despite it's sophisticated design and smart features, it is not the right tool for every job. In this excerpt from Cassandra: The Definitive Guide let’s take a quick look at what kind of projects Cassandra is a good fit for.

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Large Deployments

You probably don’t drive a semi truck to pick up your dry cleaning; semis aren’t well suited for that sort of task. Lots of careful engineering has gone into Cassandra’s high availability, tuneable consistency, peer-to-peer protocol, and seamless scaling, which are its main selling points. None of these qualities is even meaningful in a single-node deployment, let alone allowed to realize its full potential.

There are, however, a wide variety of situations where a single-node relational database is all we may need. So do some measuring. Consider your expected traffic, throughput needs, and SLAs. There are no hard and fast rules here, but if you expect that you can reliably serve traffic with an acceptable level of performance with just a few relational databases, it might be a better choice to do so, simply because RDBMS are easier to run on a single machine and are more familiar.

If you think you’ll need at least several nodes to support your efforts, however, Cassandra might be a good fit. If your application is expected to require dozens of nodes, Cassandra might be a great fit.

Lots of Writes, Statistics, and Analysis

Consider your application from the perspective of the ratio of reads to writes. Cassandra is optimized for excellent throughput on writes.

Many of the early production deployments of Cassandra involve storing user activity updates, social network usage, recommendations/reviews, and application statistics. These are strong use cases for Cassandra because they involve lots of writing with less predictable read operations, and because updates can occur unevenly with sudden spikes. In fact, the ability to handle application workloads that require high performance at significant write volumes with many concurrent client threads is one of the primary features of Cassandra.

According to the project wiki, Cassandra has been used to create a variety of applications, including a windowed time-series store, an inverted index for document searching, and a distributed job priority queue.

Geographical Distribution

Cassandra has out-of-the-box support for geographical distribution of data. You can easily configure Cassandra to replicate data across multiple data centers. If you have a globally deployed application that could see a performance benefit from putting the data near the user, Cassandra could be a great fit.

Evolving Applications

If your application is evolving rapidly and you’re in “startup mode,” Cassandra might be a good fit given its schema-free data model. This makes it easy to keep your database in step with application changes as you rapidly deploy.