if you're doing joins from hBASE, hdfs, cassandra and redis, then this works. Using it as a be all end all does not suit it. This is not your straight forward magic software that works for all scenarios. One needs to determine the use case to see if Apache Drill fits the needs. 3/4 of the time, usually it does.
We use Astra DB to improve our management systems. Storing data has become hassle-free and quite simple. When launching a Cassandra-based cloud application, Astra DB is exactly what you need. In addition to the standard training programs and videos, the extended support and training require significant additional effort to activate and cover which I feel is a bit more tedious task.
We need to be able to process a lot of data (our biggest clients process hundreds of milions of transactions every month). However, it is not only the amount of data, it is also an unpredictable patterns with spikes occuring at different points of time - something athat Astra is great at.
Our processing needs to be extremaly fast. Some of our clients use our enrichment in a synchronous way, meaning that any delay in processing is holding up the whole transaction lifecycle and can have a major impact on the client. Astra is very fast.
A close collaboration with GCP makes our life very easy. All of our technology sits in Google Cloud, so having Astra in there makes it a no-brainer solution for us.
Astra DB might be difficult to understand for people who are unfamiliar with Apache Cassandra. Improving the initial experience for newcomers, as well as offering better documentation and lessons, might be advantageous.
The Astra DB ecosystem may be enhanced by expanding the ecosystem of plugins, integrations, and community-contributed solutions.
if Presto comes up with more support (ie hbase, s3), then its strongly possible that we'll move from apache drill to prestoDB. However, Apache drill needs more configuration ease, especially when it comes to garbage collection tuning. If apache drill could support also sparkSQL and Flume, then it does change drill into being something more valuable than prestoDB
Their response time is fast, in case you do not contact them during business hours, they give a very good follow-up to your case. They also facilitate video calls if necessary for debugging.
compared to presto, has more support than prestodb. Impala has limitations to what drill can support apache phoenix only supports for hbase. no support for cassandra. Apache drill was chosen, because of the multiple data stores that it supports htat the other 3 do not support. Presto does not support hbase as of yet. Impala does not support query to cassandra
We also (briefly) considered building in-house. We wanted to avoid complex "Frankenstein" architectures. Combining Pinecone with another NoSQL datastore like DynamoDB would have increased complexity. A single-managed platform (Astra DB) enabled architectural simplicity and strong reliability, allowing Maester’s development team to prioritize high-value, customer-facing features
We are well aware of the Cassandra architecture and familiar with the open source tooling that Datastax provides the industry (K8sSandra / Stargate) to scale Cassandra on Kubernetes.
Having prior knowledge of Cassandra / Kubernetes means we know that under the hood Astra is built on infinitely scalable technologies. We trust that the foundations that Astra is built on will scale so we know Astra will scale.
Database growth planning is less of a concern with Astra, as it scales automatically.
Currently, they lack fine-grained security at the table level. I suspect that will change over time.
If your load has peaks and valleys; Astra enables only paying for Reads/Writes; thus you do not need to pay for large servers to support peaks in load.
