Astra DB from DataStax is a vector database for developers that need to get accurate Generative AI applications into production, fast.
N/A
SingleStore
Score 7.5 out of 10
N/A
SingleStore aims to enable organizations to scale from one to one million customers, handling SQL, JSON, full text and vector workloads in one unified platform.
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.
Well-Suited Scenarios: Real-Time Analytics: Financial trading platforms requiring instant insights. Operational Dashboards: Retail businesses monitoring live sales. IoT Data Processing: Smart device monitoring with high data ingestion. Fraud Detection: Banks detect suspicious transactions instantly. Less Appropriate Scenarios: Archival Storage: Cold data storage with infrequent access. Low-Volume Workloads: Small-scale apps with minimal data processing needs. Complex ETL Pipelines: Heavy data transformations without real-time demands.
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.
It does not release a patch to have back porting; it just releases a new version and stops support; it's difficult to keep up to that pace.
Support engineers lack expertise, but they seem to be improving organically.
Lacks enterprise CDC capability: Change data capture (CDC) is a process that tracks and records changes made to data in a database and then delivers those changes to other systems in real time.
For enterprise-level backup & restore capability, we had to implement our model via Velero snapshot backup.
[Until it is] supported on AWS ECS containers, I will reserve a higher rating for SingleStore. Right now it works well on EC2 and serves our current purpose, [but] would look forward to seeing SingleStore respond to our urge of feature in a shorter time period with high quality and security.
When it comes to ingestion speed, SingleStore is probably at the top. Being able to create pipelines using SQL to ingest data from S3, Kafka, and other sources, is a great advantages. This means you can dynamically ingest data by customizing your SQL queries. SingleStore pipelines are pretty sophisticated, yet very simple. Few lines of codes and you are ingesting data, while still able to perform analytical queries on your billions of row tables.
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.
The support deep dives into our most complexed queries and bizarre issues that sometimes only we get comparing to other clients. Our special workload (thousands of Kafka pipelines + high concurrency of queries). The response match to the priority of the request, P1 gets immediate return call. Missing features are treated, they become a client request and being added to the roadmap after internal consideration on all client needs and priority. Bugs are patched quite fast, depends on the impact and feasible temporary workarounds. There is no issue that we haven't got a proper answer, resolution or reasoning
We allowed 2-3 months for a thorough evaluation. We saw pretty quickly that we were likely to pick SingleStore, so we ported some of our stored procedures to SingleStore in order to take a deeper look. Two SingleStore people worked closely with us to ensure that we did not have any blocking problems. It all went remarkably smoothly.
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
Reduces database sprawl, ETL costs, infrastructure expenses, etc. Supports horizontal scaling, unlike PostgreSQL & Aurora, and real-time analytics and fast transactions (HTAP), unlike Snowflake & ClickHouse.Handles high-volume workloads with thousands of concurrent queries. No need for ETL processes, unlike BigQuery & Snowflake. Works with JSON, relational, and key-value data, unlike ClickHouse.
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.
Lower operational complexity - Installation and maintenance is pretty easy
Object scale when used can compete with Traditional Warehouse Systems like Teradata, Netezza, Greenplum
Adds lot of value to the business like couple of operations which never worked in traditional DBMS including HANA, Oracle In Memory, SQL Server In Memory just flew in SingleStore
