Astra DB vs. DataStax Enterprise

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.

Incentivized

DataStax has a good scalable option with multiple clusters and a good write rate. Cassandra also is improving and is an open-source technology that has good community support. The UI is also easy to understand and implement required functions.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Datastax Cassandra provides high availability and good performance for a database. It is built on top of open source Apache Cassandra so you can always somewhat understand the internal functioning and why.
• Datastax Cassandra is fairly simple to start using, you can install/setup your cluster and be productive in 1 day.
• Datastax Cassandra provides a lot of good detailed documentation, and when starting, the detailed free videos on the Datastax site and documentation are very helpful.
• Datastax Enterprise Edition of Cassandra provides more tools, good support, and quick response SLA for enterprise business support.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Cassandra is a bit difficult to learn and understand
• The costs are slightly higher for our company
• Hardware requirement is moderate to high at the beginning

Incentivized

We will continue to use it because it scales well with commodity hardware and we are satisfied with the documentation and support.

Incentivized

It's a great product but suffers with counters. This isn't a deal breaker but lets down what is otherwise a good all round solution

Incentivized

There is a bit of a learning curve and tasks that are simple in traditional RDBMS systems can be complicated with DataStax Enterprise but once you get the hang of denormalizing data and getting the data model correct DataStax Enterprise is very usable. Usability from the developer's standpoint is very simple - the complication is on the architecture side with the data model.

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.

Incentivized

We have had a few situations where we caused an outage or something has gone wrong and we are able to get a support person to offer live help within minutes. The escalation process is excellent - the best I've seen - and the support team is incredibly strong. Outside of emergencies, the team is very helpful with general questions and working through data model exercises and the subscription I believe still comes with some hours to help get the data model reviewed.

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

Incentivized

I believe DataStax Enterprise is the best in class. There are some things that are different with the schema-less systems but I found DataStax Enterprise easiest to implement while evaluating. The replication is on par or better than others in practice. We are evaluating Astra in our test environment and that has additional benefits we are looking forward to using.

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.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Highly Scalable Database, Highly Available Services, and Platforms.
• High Performance, Low Latency and Highest throughput across varying workloads.
• Configured, Tuned and Monitored correctly works to provide the best user experience!
• Negative: Maintenance and Debugging Corner Cases

Incentivized