Nosql Articles
Dynamo vs Cassandra : Systems Design of NoSQL Databases
02 Oct 2018 •DATA-SYSTEMS NOSQL DATABASES State-of-the-art distributed databases represent a distillation of years of research in distributed systems. The concepts underlying any distributed system can thus be overwhelming to comprehend. This is truer when you are dealing with databases without the strong consistency guarantee. Databases without strong consistency guarantees come in a range of flavours; but they are bunched under a category called NoSQL databases.
NoSQL databases do not represent a single kind of data model, nor do they offer uniform guarantees regarding consistency and availability. However, they are built on very similar principles and ideas.
From a historical perspective, the advent of NoSQL databases was precipitated by the publication of Dynamo by Amazon1 & BigTable by Google, and the emergence of a number of open-source distributed data stores, which were (improved?) clones of either (or both) of these systems. Bigtable-inspired NoSQL stores are referred to as column-stores (e.g. HyperTable, HBase), whereas Dynamo influenced most of the key/value-stores. We will term these systems loosely as Dynamo-family databases, which include Riak, Aerospike, Project Voldemort, and Cassandra.
I would like to focus on systems design ideas in Dynamo-family NoSQL databases in this article, with a particular focus on Cassandra. The approach of this article is to compare and contrast Cassandra with Dynamo; and in this process, touch upon the underlying ideas. Expect a lot of homework & further readings; I will have copious amounts of references throughout the article.
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