Astra DB vs. Percona Server for MongoDB

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

It offers good support for the implementation of solutions in the public and on-premises cloud and integration with other services such as Hashicorp Vault for data encryption. One of the main advantages is the ease of configuration, in addition to offering transaction support for the different operations and scalability of the servers.

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

• High performance
• Integration with other tools and services
• Big data projects oriented
• High availability and scalability

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

• The learning curve makes it a bit tricky to use at first.
• Documentation is an aspect to improve, especially for people who are just starting out.
• At the interface level, the user experience could be improved.

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

One aspect to improve is the user experience since sometimes the steps to take are not clear and the user may need to review some of the actions before continuing with the next ones. Another aspect to improve is the documentation and support for developers who want to know the tool.

Incentivized

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

It offers good support for the implementation of solutions in the public and on-premises cloud and integration with other services such as Hashicorp Vault for data encryption. Also, it offers support for different compatible programming languages such as C, C ++, Java, as well as offering good support for the persistence of schema-free data and the possibility of saving data in memory.

Incentivized

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

At the performance level, it is similar to other solutions such as MongoDB and Percona Server for MySQL. and at the customization level, it offers better support for the development of specific solutions that seek good performance in transactions.

Incentivized

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

• It offers a good alternative solution compared with other open source databases.
• We have many resources at the documentation level and other tools that help the integration with different programming languages.

Incentivized