What makes Cassandra (and NoSQL in general) a better solution to an RDBMS?

Question

Well, NoSQL is a buzzword right now so I\'ve been looking into it. I\'m yet to get my head around ColumnFamilies and SuperColumns, etc... But I have been looking at how the data

Answer 1

As many books about NoSQL mention, it's not about which database is better than the other. It's more what you need.

As everyone say in the other answers, many NoSQL databases support horizontal scalability and are focused on high availability but they are not always the best fit for your needs.

for example, Cassandra is great to add or remove nodes from a cluster, allowing that high scalability. But when you compare Cassandra with MySQL in an environment with just one node (one server), and with no distributed architecture, there isn't a lot of different, since the main advantages of Cassandra are not used.

Now, why should you use SQL? The most common reason is transaction management. Currently, no popular NoSQL database natively supports transactions. You can emulate them, but they are not part of the native functionality as in most SQL databases.

For Cassandra, there is a full and free training in https://academy.datastax.com

There you won't only find trainings to install and configure Cassandra, but to use its tools. It even gives you completion certificates.

Datastax has its own distribution of Cassandra, but it follows all the same guidelines as the Apache project; it offers some extra tools.