> Cassandra is a NoSQL database built for really big companies who need to store lots of data and retrieve it fast. Unlike MongoDB, which is built as a document database, Cassandra is columnar, which means data is stored in entire columns (like Snowflake, actually). Using Cassandra feels a lot more like using a relational database.
Cassandra is not a columnar database but implements the concept of a wide-column family.
"Cassandra and HBase have a concept of column families, which they inherited from Bigtable. However, it is very misleading to call them column-oriented: within each column family, they store all columns from a row together, along with a row key, and they do not use column compression. Thus, the Bigtable model is still mostly row-oriented."
- Source: Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann.
> DynamoDB is AWS’s proprietary NoSQL database
DynamoDB is based on the architecture of Amazon Dynamo whitepaper. Amazon Dynamo was/is used by the Amazon shopping cart because the database was built for extremely high availability. Apache Cassandra can be considered a spinoff because it was built on the architecture of Amazon Dynamo but with a few different design decisions.
Once upon a time I stayed buried in databases all day long. Oracle, IBM, SQLServer, and yes ... even Postgres once in a while. Thank the Lord I'm retired and don't need to worry about them anymore. I use a plain old notebook for my database these days. It's sooooo much more convenient.
Great overview as usual Justin! With the hype around generative AI and LLMs, which database models do you think are going to used a lot more? I've read comments from MongoDB say it will be an accelerant for their operational database business. Read Snowflake will benefit for their data-sharing. Can you talk about where you think LLMs will use more, obviously not restricted to these two. Could be all fluff for all I know
Hey Justin, recently a few startups running vector database are raising lots of money. How would you categorize vector database? Is it another type of transactional database?
“I heard you like databases, so I added a database of databases on my post about databases” -Justin, probably
Super interesting! Thank you
That is such a useful post and love the database of database.
💯💯
Great overview.
I'd pay for something like this but more in depth!
This is super interesting and incredibly useful. Thanks for putting this together!
Great overview. Love the database of database.
Awesome explanation :) thanks
This is super helpful! Can you please write about indexes and how search systems work under the hood?
Very informative post, thank you!
A few remarks on the following:
> Cassandra is a NoSQL database built for really big companies who need to store lots of data and retrieve it fast. Unlike MongoDB, which is built as a document database, Cassandra is columnar, which means data is stored in entire columns (like Snowflake, actually). Using Cassandra feels a lot more like using a relational database.
Cassandra is not a columnar database but implements the concept of a wide-column family.
"Cassandra and HBase have a concept of column families, which they inherited from Bigtable. However, it is very misleading to call them column-oriented: within each column family, they store all columns from a row together, along with a row key, and they do not use column compression. Thus, the Bigtable model is still mostly row-oriented."
- Source: Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann.
> DynamoDB is AWS’s proprietary NoSQL database
DynamoDB is based on the architecture of Amazon Dynamo whitepaper. Amazon Dynamo was/is used by the Amazon shopping cart because the database was built for extremely high availability. Apache Cassandra can be considered a spinoff because it was built on the architecture of Amazon Dynamo but with a few different design decisions.
Once upon a time I stayed buried in databases all day long. Oracle, IBM, SQLServer, and yes ... even Postgres once in a while. Thank the Lord I'm retired and don't need to worry about them anymore. I use a plain old notebook for my database these days. It's sooooo much more convenient.
Great overview as usual Justin! With the hype around generative AI and LLMs, which database models do you think are going to used a lot more? I've read comments from MongoDB say it will be an accelerant for their operational database business. Read Snowflake will benefit for their data-sharing. Can you talk about where you think LLMs will use more, obviously not restricted to these two. Could be all fluff for all I know
I read ‘diabetes’ haha
Hey Justin, recently a few startups running vector database are raising lots of money. How would you categorize vector database? Is it another type of transactional database?