A Cassandra data modeling session around a real-life scenario: tracking data for A/B tests:

With most things in life data modeling in Cassandra can be compared to learning to ride a bike. It can be scary, you might fall off, but in the end once you learn a few fundamental concepts everything will be easier to do. The goal of this article is to get you comfortable with a basic data modeling scenario that you will likely see in the real world.

Original title and link: Modeling A/B Tests With Cassandra (NoSQL database©myNoSQL)

via: http://www.datastax.com/dev/blog/ab-testing-with-apache-cassandra

Tim Moreton¹:

I expect not much in the short term, until some key issues are solved. First, the sources and consumers of data are still on-site. These guys are tackling a specific technical limitation, not necessarily looking to re-architect their wider systems, which are often complex and inter-dependent. Second, security and regulatory concerns may need addressing. Third, the TCO needs to stack up. A quick and dirty back of the envelope calculation suggests that although it’s free to get started with DynamoDB, for the sort of deployment sizes we’re seeing, DynamoDB works out considerably more expensive than alternatives like Acunu deployed on hardware (even after accounting for typical full costing for outsourced data centers).

Keeping my eyes on all things NoSQL for more than 2 years, I’d say that NoSQL databases in general do not mean much for the enterprise world². Yet.

Original title and link: What does DynamoDB mean for the enteprise world? (NoSQL database©myNoSQL)

via: http://www.acunu.com/blogs/tim-moreton/welcome-party-dynamodb/

Billy Bosworth¹:

Personally, I have never believed that other post-relational (aka NoSQL/Hadoop) database companies were our primary competition.  The brute fact of the matter is that if you put us all together, we are still not statistically relevant compared to the overall DBMS market.

I had only one real personal fear coming into this market: That I would sink a big portion of my life into something that would never take hold in the mainstream. I suspect that would be a truly awful ending for all of us in this space. But thanks to companies like Amazon and Oracle, that feels highly unlikely now, and that is a great thing.

Just to play the devil advocate for a second: Oracle won’t lose much in the NoSQL market if things don’t work out well and Amazon’s DynamoDB is part of a larger plan. But for all the NoSQL database companies it is an all-or-nothing game².

Original title and link: DataStax’s CEO thoughts on the NoSQL Market and Competition (NoSQL database©myNoSQL)

via: http://www.datastax.com/2012/01/my-thoughts-on-amazons-dynamodb

Adrian Cockcroft:

So the lesson here is that for a first step into NoSQL, we went with a hosted solution so that we didn’t have to build a team of experts to run it, and we didn’t have to decide in advance how much scale we needed. Starting again from scratch today, I would probably go with DynamoDB. It’s a low “friction” and developer friendly solution.

You can look at this in two ways: 1) a biased opinion of someone that has already betted on Amazon with the infrastructure of a multi-billion business; 2) the opinion of someone that has accumulated a ton of experience in the NoSQL space and that is successfully¹ running the infrastructure of a multi-billion business on NoSQL solutions. I’d strongly suggest you to think of it as the latter.

Original title and link: Thoughts on SimpleDB, DynamoDB and Cassandra (NoSQL database©myNoSQL)

via: http://perfcap.blogspot.com/2012/01/thoughts-on-simpledb-dynamodb-and.html

James Philips (Couchbase) for Curt Monash:

• MongoDB is the big competition. He believes Couchbase has an excellent win rate vs. 10gen for actual paying accounts.
• DataStax/Cassandra wins over Couchbase only when multi-data-center capability is important. Naturally, multi-data-center capability is planned for Couchbase. (Indeed, that’s one of the benefits of swapping in CouchDB at the back end.)
• Redis has “dropped off the radar”, presumably because there’s no particular persistence strategy for it.
• Riak doesn’t show up much.

I assume this is sort of a pre-sales/sales department 100k feet overview.

Original title and link: NoSQL Market from Couchbase Perspective (NoSQL database©myNoSQL)

via: http://www.dbms2.com/2012/02/01/couchbase-update/

All the basic steps of installing Cassandra, creating a keyspace and column families, inserting and manipulating data, querying data with CQL on a single page. Even if a bit old, you could continue next with my tutorial on getting started with Cassandra.

Original title and link: NoSQL Tutorials: Getting Started With Cassandra (NoSQL database©myNoSQL)

via: http://www.datastax.com/resources/articles/getting-started-with-apache-cassandra