Jonathan Ellis - Cassandra Summit 2012 - theCUBE
Channel: SiliconANGLE theCUBE
Date: 2012-08-08

The Cube - Cassandra Summit 2012 - Jonathan Ellis, DataStax, with John Furrier and Jeff Kelly
In their ongoing coverage of the 2012 Cassandra Summit in Santa Clara, California, John Furrier and Jeff Kelly spoke with Co-Founder and CTO of DataStax, Jonathan Ellis (see full video below). The panelists discuss Cassandra’s strengths in light of the NoSQL movement, SSD’s increasing momentum, and how Cassandra distinguishes itself from MongoDB and HBase.

Furrier highlights how data solutions have changed over time (noting that he comes from the “old-school” database generation) to address problems around mobile, data and cloud. He asks Ellis’ opinion on the new key challenge in the marketplace. Ellis suggests the NoSQL movement (not only SQL) is important to this discussion, as it has been “a blessing and a curse” to Cassandra. While “relational databases are a hammer,” Ellis warns, “not every problem is a nail” and “there are other tools that are better at solving specific problems.” Ellis explains that Cassandra is more concerned with scaling applications than the language you access them with: “We can make trade-offs that are more appropriate for scaling real-time applications that make Cassandra a better fit than MySQL or ORACLE.”

Furrier probes further about Cassandra’s strongest assets and how SSD has impacted its growth. Ellis says what Cassandra does better than anyone else in providing support for multiple data centers. Ellis refers to SSD as a “slow revolution,” citing early adopters like Amazon and Microsoft. The advantage Ellis sees in cloud is that, one can say: “I’m not going to focus on hiring ops teams and training them, I’m going to focus on my core business and… outsource that infrastructure…I don’t think there’s one right answer for anyone.” Furrier adds that he thinks cloud will be around, but he doesn’t see it as “revolutionary as big data.”

Kelly inquires about what distinguishes NoSQL solutions from one another. Ellis explains that Voldemort is in the same general area as Cassandra, “but there still isn’t that much community around Voldemort.” But, he does see room for diversification with companies like MongoDB, which targets small businesses and hobbyists. Ellis describes the Cassandra community as practical “problem servers,” concerned more with accessibility than theory.

Furrier also inquires about Ellis’ philosophy about using different tools. Ellis says that he is a big fan of the python language, but building a database around python isn’t as effective as Java, given its speed. Ellis says he would trade-off exclusivity for performance in such cases