On 1 March 2010 13:16, HHB <hubaghdadi@yahoo.ca> wrote:

Hey,
What are the typical use cases for Cassandra?

I'm not sure there are *really* typical use cases.

Our use case is likely to be big audit data.

But Cassandra doesn't yet support a mechanism for efficiently expiring old data; I'm waiting for various things to be implemented (If we were a bit nearer wanting it, I'd work on it myself!)

I'm working for an ISP (Internet Service Provider), do you think we can
employ Cassandra? and for what?

I don't know in what capacity you would want to use it. But don't treat it as a solution looking for a problem, find a problem first and only use Cassandra IF you feel it's suitable and necessary.

"Conventional" databases are much easier to operate. Or at least, they are better understood. If you don't need Cassandra's features, then you should probably use those instead.

For me the killers are:

* Very high write throughput
* High availability

There is also no point in using Cassandra if you plan to deploy less than (approximately) 6 nodes (maybe 2-3x your replication factor), as you will be able to achieve good performance at that scale using more conventional systems.

Mark