Column Stores

After looking at both Cassandra and HBase, there is a natural tendency to wonder which one is better. This is not an easy decision to make. If you are highly-experienced with databases and database server administration then your priorities and preferences could be very different from someone who is just starting out on their first large-scale NoSQL setup. So rather ... Read More »

Overview Amazon Redshift is technically a relational database management system and supports many of the features of a typical RDBMS.   However, it is geared for the high performance analysis needs found in traditional OLAP reporting systems without the need for cubes and pre-processing.  Due to its scalable architecture and columnar storage design along with the support of the other AWS ... Read More »

In looking at the features of Cassandra, it seems clear that many of them are aimed at particularly large enterprises, while others would also be useful for smaller applications. There are no clear-cut rules when you are selecting database software, but the following points offer a little guidance as to when you could be thinking about using Cassandra. 1. You ... Read More »

Apache HBase™ HBase is a wide-column (or column-oriented) database based on Google’s BigTable. Despite being best known as the NoSQL solution that Facebook adopted for their messaging platform (abandoning their own database, Cassandra, in the process), it has a fairly enviable list of companies that use it – including Adobe, Twitter, and Yahoo! It was originally developed by Powerset, for ... Read More »

The Apache Cassandra Project Cassandra has already been mentioned a few times on this blog, due to its status as one of the big two NoSQL wide-column database solutions and its use by eBay, Netflix, Twitter and Reddit (among others). It was originally developed by Facebook, to power their inbox search feature, but was released under an open-source license in ... Read More »

NoSQL Wide-Column Databases The NoSQL wide-column (or “extensible record set”) database has some passing similarity to traditional database in its use of rows, columns and tables. The important difference here is that columns are created for each row rather than being predefined by the table structure. For software developers, it can sometimes be helpful to think of them as a ... Read More »