The latest DFW Big Data meeting showcased Cassandra, with a presentation by Tyler Hobbs, from DataStax. Tyler had to run off to catch a plane, so the Q&A was handled by Eric Evans from Acunu.

DataStax is a Cassandra based products company, offering both community (Open Source) and enterprise editions of their version of Cassandra, and toolset. Acunu apparently offers a version of Cassandra with a proprietary storage stack, leveraging the benefits of using Cassandra while improving performance and predictability at scale.

For those of you (like me) that don’t follow every detail of the NoSQL space, Cassandra blends Dynamo’s distributed nature with Bigtable’s column style model. This is reported to give fault tolerance, with no single point of failure, and the ability to query series data efficiently.

I’m kinda tired, and going to bed, but you can bet my brain is buzzing with possibilties of time series data and aggregations. I might actually give cassandra a try :)

/Korishev