DataStax Enterprise

Score9.1 out of 10

17 Reviews and Ratings

What is DataStax Enterprise?

DataStax Enterprise (DSE) is the scale-out, cloud-native NoSQL database built on Apache Cassandra. DSE is Developer Ready providing developers the freedom of choice of REST, GraphQL, CQL and JSON/Document APIs.

Categories & Use Cases

Availability
Availability is the probability that the NoSQL database will be available to preform its function when called upon.
Category average: 8.9
Scalability
NoSQL databases are inherently more stable than relational databases and have built-in support for replication and partitioning of data to support scalability.
Category average: 9.4
Performance
How fast the database performs under data load
Category average: 9.2

Security
Security features include authentication against external security mechanisms liker LDAP, Windows Active Directory, and authorization or privilege management. Some NoSQL databases also support encryption.
Category average: 8.9
Deployment model flexibility
Can be deployed on-premise or in the cloud.
Category average: 8.9
Data model flexibility
NoSQL databases do not rely on rely on tables, columns, rows, or schemas to organize and retrieve data, but use use more flexible data models to accommodate the large volume and variety of data being generated by modern applications.
Category average: 9

Julian Chultarsky View profile

Principal Technologist in Information Technology at General Electric Aviation (10,001+ employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

The design and development of new aircraft engines require large amounts of sensor data to be stored, managed, and queried. The availability of the data and the query performance is critical to the safety of people and equipment. Traditional RDBMS systems proved to be inadequate for the job as the volumes and velocity of information increased. We selected DataStax Enterprise for its high availability, and best-in-class write performance. There is a learning curve to be overcome, but in the end, the new system matched and exceeded expectations. As a result, the company has a new reliable platform to support the business needs for years in the future.

Pros

Horizontal scalability
High availability
Fast writes

Cons

Query flexibility
User experience
Node density

Return on Investment

Reduction in TCO of >60%
Strategic technology to manage data at large scale
Enables new use cases

Alternatives Considered

Apache HBase, Redis, Apache Cassandra, Teradata Data Warehouse Appliance 2850 and Oracle Autonomous Database

Usability

Verified User

C-Level Executive in Information Technology (11-50 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

DataStax Enterprise is the primary database for all transactional processing. DataStax Enterprise provides linear scale as well as multi-datacenter real-time replication of data such that we can maintain uptime even with the loss of multiple data centers. Keeping the system up and the data fresh is of paramount importance for our clients. Performance is also top of mind and DataStax Enterprise delivers best-in-class performance.

Pros

Scaling
Speed of data access
Ease of use with those familiar with traditional SQL
Best in class support team

Cons

Hybrid on-prem / cloud solution with Astra.
Better compatibility with prior versions in terms of codebase.

Return on Investment

Ability to have our services up and running even with a total outage at one of our data centers.
No need to maintain windows since we can turn off data centers while doing maintenance and then put them back in the rotation and move on.
If not keeping current with updates, updating from an older major version to a newer major version can be a bit complicated and time-consuming but DataStax Enterprise support will help with this.

Alternatives Considered

Couchbase and Azure Cosmos DB

Other Software Used

MySQL, Apache Tomcat, Oracle Java SE, Microsoft Power BI

Usability

Verified User

Employee in Information Technology (1-10 employees employees)

Pros

Easily and highly Scalable
Simple UI
High uptime

Cons

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

Return on Investment

High scalability
Easy to understand UI. Less time spent on understanding.
Good customer support and solve problems quickly.

Other Software Used

MongoDB

Usability

Robert Xu

Director, Database Administration in Information Technology at Connexity, Inc. (201-500 employees employees)

Pros

It is always up, very fault tolerant.
Tunable consistency, flexible in that regard.
Nice management tools.

Cons

Support for aggregation functions is still limited.

Return on Investment

Almost zero downtime, best for business continuity.
Easy to do maintenance online.

Verified User

Professional in Information Technology (5001-10,000 employees employees)

Pros

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.

Cons

The move from SQL to NoSQL paradigm is always difficult for people who have been using SQL for most part of their technical lives. Even if NoSQL has better performance and is more scalable, the database interface/functionality needs to be seamless for users. This has always been the top challenge. Now with the advent of ACID and horizontally scaling Google Spanner, the competition is rife for what a database can provide.
Though one can be immediately productive, if you get corner cases in your usage with Datastax Cassandra, you have to really know it better. There is a learning curve. Understanding Cassandra server logs, audit logs and sstables helps.
Debugging can be longer especially if you hit corner cases, like not using Light Weight transaction correctly, timestamp ties or getting RuntimeException on scrub/repair/compaction (java.lang.RuntimeException: 30623431613136352d656433372d343939322d393066342d366632313961393530353062 is not defined as a collection) and such.
Datastax Cassandra has great benefits in product, and features but there are costs on infrastructure maintenance and regular operational tasks. Not that there is any technical component that can self heal :-), but this time investment in Datastax Cassandra is more compared to SQL db, say MySQL.

Return on Investment

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

Alternatives Considered

Amazon Aurora, Amazon DynamoDB and Google Spanner

Other Software Used

Apache Spark

MongoDB

Amazon DynamoDB

Azure Cosmos DB

DataStax Enterprise

What is DataStax Enterprise?

Categories & Use Cases

Key Features

Top Performing Features

Availability

Scalability

Performance

Areas for Improvement

Security

Deployment model flexibility

Data model flexibility

Reviews

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Pros

Cons

Return on Investment

Alternatives Considered

Usability

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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Cons

Return on Investment

Alternatives Considered

Other Software Used

Usability

Pros

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Return on Investment

Other Software Used

Usability

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Return on Investment

Pros

Cons

Return on Investment

Alternatives Considered

Other Software Used

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