Is Cassandra NoSQL?
Yes, Apache Cassandra is a NoSQL Database. Apache Cassandra is a type of NoSQL Columnar Databases. Apache Cassandra is a Column-Oriented Database. NoSQL database is a non-relational database capable of handling Structured, Semi-Structured and Un-Structured data.
Cassandra
Apache Cassandra is an open-source NoSQL database and highly scalable database. Apache Cassandra is a distributed and high-performance database. It is an Apache community product and freely available. You do not have to pay for the license to use personally or professionally. It is a highly scalable and available database without compromising on performance. Apache Cassandra is a perfect data platform characterized by fault tolerance and linear scalability. Apache Cassandra is designed to handle a huge amount of data. Apache Cassandra allows to store and manage high velocity structured data and unstructured data across multiple commodity servers. Cassandra combines all the benefits of Google Bigtable and Amazon Dynamo for database management. It provides a highly available service with no single point of failure. Apache Cassandra offers robust support for clusters of commodity hardware.
NoSQL
NoSQL stands for “Not Only SQL”. NoSQL is a new breed of a database management system. NoSQL databases fundamentally differ from relational database systems. NoSQL databases do not follow all the rules of traditional database systems as it allows you to store and process unstructured and semi-structured data as well. NoSQL is a highly scalable and flexible database. NoSQL database typically supports horizontal scaling. NoSQL database store and manage data in ways that allow for high operational speed and great flexibility on the part of the developers. NoSQL databases resolve the issue by incorporating a wide range of technologies that make the systems scalable and suitable for big data operations. NoSQL databases are widely recognized for their ease of development, functionality, and performance at scale.
Can Cassandra replace NoSQL?
NoSQL database is of four types and can be deployed in any of the ways, Columnar Databases, Document Databases, Graph Databases, In-Memory Key-Value Stores. There are different databases in each of these domains. Apache Cassandra is a type of Columnar Database. Apache Cassandra was created on Facebook. Cassandra differs sharply from RDBMS. Cassandra is a powerful column family data model and implements Dynamo-style replications with no single point of failure. Cassandra can be easily scaled to meet the sudden increase in demand definitely by deploying a multi-node Cassandra cluster and meeting high availability requirements. Cassandra biggest strength is to handle a massive amount of unstructured data. Cassandra is being used by some of the biggest companies of the IT Industry such as Facebook, Cisco, eBay, Netflix, Instagram, Twitter, Rackspace, eBay, and more. 80 million photos are uploaded to the Cassandra database every day on Instagram. Apache Cassandra is a type of NoSQL database. The features of NoSQL aligns with the offering of Cassandra. So, NoSQL cannot replace Cassandra or Cassandra cannot replace NoSQL.
Difference Between Cassandra and NoSQL
- Apache Cassandra has decentralized architecture and any node can perform any operation. Cassandra provides features like Availability and Partition from CAP- Theorem While NoSQL database is a schema-less, shared-nothing architecture, scale-out, and capable of running on a large number of nodes.
- Apache Cassandra is well suited for supporting single-row queries or selecting multiple rows based on a Column-Value index while NoSQL has architecture providing higher performance per node than relational databases.
- Apache Cassandra serves data from a database to online transactional applications works on the back end of the online systems and business intelligence while Open-source NoSQL databases don’t require expensive licensing fees and can run on inexpensive hardware, rendering their deployment cost-effective.
NoSQL Database Types
Below are the different types of NoSQL Database:
- Columnar Databases: HBase and Cassandra is a type of Columnar database. Columnar database reads and writes columns of data rather than the rows. Each column is comparable to a container in relational databases and Key defines a row and single row has multiple columns.
- Document Databases: CouchDB and MongoDB is a type of Document Database. Document databases store and retrieve semi-structured data in the format of documents such as XML, JSON, etc.
- Graph Databases: Polyglot, Neo4J is a type of Graph Database. Data has represented as a network a graph of entities and stores data as entities and relations between them allowing faster traversal and joining operations to be performed. However, these graphs can be built using SQL as well as NoSQL databases. A directed graph structure is used to represent the data.
- In-Memory Key-Value Stores: Redis and Riak is a type of in-memory databases. The in-memory database is suitable for read-heavy workloads and compute-intensive workloads, these databases store critical data in memory which in turn improves the performance of the systems.
Features of Cassandra
Cassandra is famous among professional because of the following reasons:
- Always on architecture: There is no single point of failure in Cassandra and it is continuously available for business-critical applications without any fail.
- Scalable Architecture: Cassandra is horizontally scalable. Cassandra has a master-less design where all nodes are at the same level which provides operational simplicity and easily scale out. There is flexibility for adding or deleting any number of nodes from the cluster without disturbances.
- Data Compression: Cassandra can compress up to 80% data without any overhead.
- Flexible data storage: Cassandra stores and process all formats of data structured, semi-structured, and unstructured. Cassandra framework dynamically accommodates changes to your data structures according to your need.
- CQL (Cassandra Query Language): A SQL-like language that makes moving from a relational database very easy.
- Transaction support: Cassandra supports ACID properties and CAP Theorem like Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, and Durability.
- Flexible and Dynamic Data Model: Apache works on commodity hardware. Cassandra supports datatypes with Fast writes and reads.
Conclusion – Is Cassandra NoSQL
The age of digitization has made the world generate massive amounts of data. Most of the conventional databases are not prepared to handle these data seamlessly which gives rise to the need to create the kind of databases which do not require modeling and structuring the data structures before storing it. Apache Cassandra is a type of NoSQL Database. Cassandra database can be extremely useful for a multitude of tasks. Cassandra is designed to handle real-time data produced by companies like Facebook, Instagram.
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