September 2021 Summaries

The choice between SQL and NoSQL databases depends on various factors such as querying needs, availability requirements, compliance standards, data types, and expected growth. SQL databases have been around since the 1970s and are characterized by highly structured tables with rows and columns. They offer advantages like data consistency, integrity, security, and compliance but can be rigid and difficult to modify. NoSQL databases emerged later and allow for storage of all data types, structured and unstructured, together. They are flexible and easy for developers to work with and modify. SQL databases are ACID compliant, while NoSQL databases follow the BASE consistency model. Both have their pros and cons, and the best choice depends on an organization's specific needs and goals.

Nathan Bak, principal engineer at Circle, shares how his company uses DataStax Astra DB to manage its cloud-based services for families. The main challenges they face are right-sizing their database and dealing with hard limits as data grows. Astra DB's elastic scaling feature allows them to handle varying workloads and storage requirements easily. They use Astra DB for proofs of concepts, such as sending usage emails to customers, and find it particularly useful for quick or small projects due to its ease of setup and scalability. The best attribute of Astra DB is its underlying Cassandra technology, which provides robust data handling capabilities without requiring extensive configuration efforts.

The article discusses a complex bug that took weeks to debug, involving multiple layers of software stack. It started with a performance test timing out after 16 hours due to an issue in the Linux kernel hrtimer code. Fallout, an open-source distributed systems testing service, was instrumental in quickly iterating and gathering new data to validate and invalidate guesses about the underlying bug. The author used various tools like nodetool tpstats, jstack, and BPF script to understand the issue at different levels of the stack. The kernel bug causing the red-black tree to become inconsistent was already fixed upstream in Linux 5.12 but not yet pulled into Ubuntu's kernel. The author suggests having a bag of tools and techniques to understand the behavior of an app at various levels of the stack, and services like Fallout for automatic deployment and provisioning of virtual machines for running tests.

Logate, an enterprise software solutions provider based in Montenegro, has been using Apache Cassandra since late 2017 to enhance its AI capabilities and provide real-time advanced analytics for clients in telecom, financial services, and other sectors. The company switched from Galera Cluster due to scaling limitations and data consistency issues. With Cassandra, Logate can now create systems that work across multiple data centers as one logical cluster, achieving tens of thousands of transactions per second (TPS) with a geo-redundant setup. The team acquired skills in working with Cassandra through online courses and performance tests, and has since been able to offer its clients the possibility to extend their system on three or more data centers with confidence that performance will be better. DataStax experts have also provided valuable support for JVM configurations and database table modeling.

Apache Cassandra, an open-source distributed NoSQL database, is often used as the backend for modern applications. Running alongside Kubernetes, a container orchestration platform for microservices, can create complexity due to managing two distributed systems. To simplify this, DataStax introduced K8ssandra, an open-source cloud-native distribution of Cassandra that automates deployment and operations on Kubernetes. With the recent certification of K8ssandra on VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid, enterprises can now manage their applications and data workloads in a hybrid environment, whether on premises, at the edge, or in any public cloud. This allows for seamless running of microservices with less operational headache and increased developer productivity by exposing the data backend as modern APIs.

Apache Cassandra 4.0 can now be easily deployed on Kubernetes through the AWS Cloud Marketplace, with wider support expected soon. The setup process involves configuring Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) infrastructure according to Cassandra's high-availability best practices and utilizing K8ssandra for configuration. This development marks a significant improvement in database management, as it reduces the need for manual handling of physical drives and allows users to take advantage of "infrastructure as code" principles. The collaboration between the Cassandra and cloud native communities has led to successful solutions for running stateful workloads on Kubernetes. Users can now enjoy an enhanced experience with Cassandra 4.0, which includes Astra DB credit accrual at a rate of $7/node/month.

The advent of cloud, IoT, mobile devices, and always-available customer engagements has prompted enterprises to move modern workloads from relational databases to NoSQL ones like Apache Cassandra® for improved application performance and business agility. However, migration is not straightforward due to a lack of tools, skilled resources, and partners. DataStax has developed the RDBMS-to-Apache Cassandra accelerator, a comprehensive set of tools that enable enterprises to assess, plan, and design the migration of RDBMS workloads to Cassandra. The accelerator provides a quick and easy way to probe the source relational database, assess the relational tables, relations, query patterns, and stored procedures of the workloads that enterprises want to migrate. DataStax also offers the RDBMS-to-Apache Cassandra Migration Assessment and Strategy Package, which can reduce the migration timeframe by as much as two-thirds.

DataStax Astra DB, a Database-as-a-Service (DbaaS) built around Apache Cassandra®, offers significant benefits for enterprises undergoing digital transformation and data modernization. It eliminates operational overhead, saves costs, and allows users to choose their preferred cloud vendor without the worry of getting locked in. DataStax's Zero Downtime Migration product enables seamless migration of existing Cassandra workloads to Astra DB without any business interruptions. The new generation of the proxy tool supports migrations to serverless Astra DB and other potential use-cases, with deployment flexibility and optional automation tools for easier management over time. DataStax plans to open source the proxy codebase later this year to expand its capabilities and improve application migration between clusters and infrastructure.

A live event featuring Alex Ellis, OpenFaaS, and Stefano Lottini from DataStax will take place on Thursday, September 16th at 4:00 p.m. BST//11:00 a.m. EDT/8:00 a.m. PDT to discuss Functions-as-service (FaaS), Astra DB, and Node.js. The event will cover the integration of serverless functions with an autoscaling Database as a Service (DBaaS) like DataStax Astra DB for end-to-end automated scaling. Attendees can learn how to pair FaaS with a serverless, autoscaling DBaaS and ask questions live during the event.

DataStax Astra DB, a serverless multi-cloud Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) built on Apache Cassandra®, now supports multi-region deployments. This feature enables businesses to have their databases geographically distributed and active-active, improving responsiveness and availability. The consumption-based pricing model dramatically reduces the total cost of ownership, making multi-region databases more affordable for organizations of all sizes. Astra DB also helps with disaster recovery, data sovereignty, and latency issues by replicating data across regions and supporting an active-active architecture.

In today's digital marketplace, businesses need to satisfy increasing data demands by choosing between traditional relational database management systems (RDBMS) or NoSQL databases. RDBMS uses tables made up of rows and columns for structured data storage, while NoSQL is designed for modern environments that span digital, mobile, and cloud applications. The choice depends on factors such as application requirements, data types, expected growth, and downtime tolerance. While relational databases are suitable for transaction-focused applications with clear relationships and complex queries, NoSQL databases are better suited for handling big data, performing real-time analytics, and working with a variety of data types. Companies like ACI Worldwide have successfully implemented NoSQL databases to improve fraud detection rates and save millions of dollars in the process.

Verinovum is a healthcare data curation and enrichment company that aims to improve outcomes for common diseases by providing clean, complete, and accurate clinical data. Founded in 2013, the company gathers clinical data from disparate sites, aggregates and cleans it, then provides it to clients for initiatives like risk assessments and population health programs. Verinovum's biggest challenge is maintaining performance while keeping up with the scale and volume of incoming data. The company uses Cassandra, a distributed database system, which has helped improve flexibility in their data model and save time on data modeling. They also partnered with DataStax to better utilize Cassandra and optimize their platform for high-volume transactions. By providing cleaner, enriched data, Verinovum helps insurance companies, healthcare providers, and patients by enabling early disease detection and intervention, ultimately reducing healthcare costs.

DataStax Astra DB's adoption is growing rapidly due to its speed, ease of use, autoscaling, and consumption-based pricing. To enhance security for users, private endpoint on AWS, GCP, and Azure has been made generally available. Private endpoint enables secure connections between applications or microservices in a virtual private cloud (VPC) and Astra DB. This feature helps meet the security and governance requirements of enterprises by ensuring all traffic remains within the cloud provider's private network backbone. Users can associate private endpoints with security groups to enforce governance on network traffic through security group rules. Private endpoint is scalable, easier to configure than VPC peering, and supports AWS PrivateLink, Google Private Service Connect, and Azure Private Link. It can be configured using the Astra DB DevOps API or soon via the Astra UI or console.

Verinovum is a healthcare data curation and enrichment company that aims to improve outcomes for common diseases by providing clean, complete, and accurate clinical data. Founded in 2013, the company gathers clinical data from disparate sites, aggregates and cleans it, then provides it to clients for initiatives like risk assessments and population health programs. Verinovum's biggest challenge is managing the scale and volume of data while maintaining performance and flexibility in their data model. They use Cassandra, partnering with DataStax, which has significantly improved their ability to manage high-volume transactions and change the data model quickly when needed. The company sees a future where they can help healthcare providers and payers improve operational processes and early disease detection by providing clean, trustworthy clinical data.