What are the strengths and weaknesses of Cassandra?
Cassandra is a distributed database system that has its own advantages and disadvantages.
Advantages:
- High scalability: Cassandra supports horizontal scaling, making it easy to add more nodes to handle larger datasets and higher loads.
- High performance: Cassandra utilizes a distributed architecture and a design with no central nodes, enabling high throughput and low latency read and write operations.
- Cassandra possesses exceptional writing capabilities, allowing it to efficiently handle a large volume of concurrent write requests.
- Fault tolerance: Cassandra has data redundancy and automatic fault recovery mechanisms. In the event of a node failure, the system can automatically replicate data to other nodes to ensure data is not lost.
- Flexible data model: Cassandra allows for a flexible data model, which can be organized and queried through column families and columns.
downside:
- Query Complexity: Cassandra lacks support for complex query operations such as JOIN operations and aggregation functions, which limits its applicability in certain scenarios.
- Lack of transaction support: Cassandra does not support ACID transactions typically found in traditional databases, instead opting for an eventual consistency model, which can be a drawback for some use cases.
- High storage demand: Cassandra requires more storage space for data replication and redundancy, leading to relatively high storage requirements.
- Learning and managing can be costly: Configuring and managing Cassandra is relatively complex, requiring specialized knowledge and experience, which may result in higher costs for some small projects and teams.
