Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Appendix B
. Enterprise Cassandra
This topic focuses on the open-source side of Cassandra and the freely available
tools that ship with it, but there is also an enterprise ecosystem that has been built
around Cassandra. Many companies offer products built on Cassandra and around
Cassandra.
DataStax
DataStax offers an enterprise version of Cassandra that comes with a few addi-
tional tools. These include analytics, monitoring, and search packages with easy
installation packages available for common Linux distributions. DataStax also of-
fers full support for in-house DataStax Enterprise Cassandra installations, training
sessions, and consultancy services.
The DataStax Enterprise offering comes out of the box with a few enterprise-
level security features. These include internal and external authentication for data-
base access as well as granular permissioning for better access control. Encryption
options are also provided at various levels of the stack, such as file system and
network traffic encryption for better security.
Apache Hadoop powers the analytics system that DataStax offers. It offers dir-
ect connectors to a number of analytics operations systems. These include Hive,
Pig, Sqoop, Mahout, and MapReduce. DataStax Enterprise is not specifically
a data warehouse but takes advantage of the analytics capabilities provided by
Hadoop-style tools.
The search system provided by DataStax Enterprise is based on Apache Solr.
This means that Cassandra can now provide full text search capability. Solr comes
with the ability to give results highlighting, faceted searches (brand, type, size,
etc.), rich document handling (HTML, PDF, audio and video formats, etc.), and
even geospatial searches.
The major benefit that DataStax Enterprise offers is that the administrative
overhead of managing complex systems like Hadoop and Solr is abstracted away
from the user as much as possible. This means not having to worry about setting up
all the aspects of Hadoop nodes like region servers and ZooKeeper. It also means
that if you are running Solr, you don't have to think about handling sharding and
redistribution of data. Cassandra handles that for you under the hood.
