Database system combining two published technologies battle-tested by two of the largest Internet websites performs better under real world conditions than database written by amateurs, news at 11!

(In all seriousness, what did they expect? Have they looked at the MongoDB code? Do they seriously believe that the 10gen folks are smarter or better at solving problems than the masses of engineers Google and Amazon have thrown at this problem?)

Where Cassandra REALLY shines and is often overlooked is ease of maintenance. Cassandra's ability to bootstrap new nodes, replicate, reshard and handle down nodes (w/ hinted handoff) is almost magical. I use it in production and it works very reliably.

Sure, it's got some cool big data stuff, but try doing any of those "maintenance" operations on other databases without ripping your hair out. For example, even bringing up a new MySQL slave is a huge pain in the ass, let alone doing something non-trivial like promoting a new master.

Did you guys investigate any other choices such as DynamoDB, or HBase? I know that Facebook (inventors of Cassandra) have moved off of Cassandra over to HBase for its back-end messaging services due to its inherent consistency problems.

I think in the near future Mongodb will no longer have a global write lock. Yeah but I feel their pain. Given my still limited experience with it, Mongodb may be great for reads, but not so much for writes.

The problem of course with Cassandra is getting results you will believe out of it. Also I understand Cassandra to be a Trojan. Use at your own risk. When Atlas lets you down and AJAX has gone crazy (like slaughtering all your cows in a fit of drunken pique), and your city is in flames don't say I didn't warn you. But you won't believe me either ;-)

(ok, sorry for the obligatory Illiad joke there.)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3984642