Is Datastax Cassandra the only available Cassandra that can be used in a production environment? Is there any free alternatives available? What about the cassandra available on Apache site?
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2Apache cassandra can be used in production. – Don Branson Jul 03 '14 at 23:43
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does it come with any UI for administration and querying? – l a s Jul 04 '14 at 00:52
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no UI, it is coming with CQL command line which will work similar as mysql command line.. – Helping Hand.. Jul 05 '14 at 10:42
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can i use any db client or even the one that comes with datastax? – l a s Jul 05 '14 at 11:15
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4DataStax Dev Center works with apache cassandra as well, and it's free. Opscenter works with apache cassandra too. It's free, and you can use it to monitor and administer apache cassandra as well as DSE. However, when hooked up to apache cassandra, some features of Opscenter are disabled. Basic functionality (monitoring, node admin like restart, repair, etc., basic http security, graphs and charts) work fine with apache cassandra. – ashic Aug 20 '14 at 18:39
7 Answers
Datastax Community Edition is also free, it contains a basic version of OpsCenter -- http://planetcassandra.org/cassandra/
Here is the difference between the community edition and DSE

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2If you're a start-up you may qualify to use DSE for free -- http://www.datastax.com/what-we-offer/products-services/datastax-enterprise/startups – phact Aug 19 '14 at 22:53
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The second link is no longer valid. Could you please update it? Thanks! :) – carlspring Feb 28 '21 at 22:01
They can both be used in production. DataStax Enterprise comes with a bunch of extra features on top of Apache Cassandra, and also comes with support.

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Datastax is a commercial company, who supports C*. The base source code of Cassandra is taken of the Apache Repositories, then some of their own code is merged. Besides this, as already mentioned by others, Datastax version comes with some additional tools for maintaining a Cassandra Cluster. One of the benefits of Datastax Enterprise is their neatless SOLR Integration, another great Apache Foundation Project. Cassandra comes with a Query Language called CQL (Cassandra Query Language) which is "similar" to SQL, you should however think of CQL like a cousin of SQL, not a brother. One of the great features of the Enterprise edition is that you can query a SOLR index through their CQL integration, also a Cassandra Cluster shares it's resources with SOLR, so you don't need a second Cluster for SOLR. You could... set up Apache or Datastax Cassandra, you would get almost the same thing, but if you need something similar to SQL Like Statement (natively not available in Cassandra), or you do have a very much denormalized database and you need search capabilities, then Datstax Enterprise (DSE) is your only viable choice. As someone already has mentioned, DSE is free for startups until they reach an annual revenue of 3m USD, or are funded with 30m. This should give everybody the opportunity to leverage the power of NoSQL and use one of the most reliable databases for big data out there.

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For the Cassandra product, you can use the Apache open source offering in production, if your organisation is comfortable with open source.
You can also use the Datastax Community version of Cassandra, which is also open source and free to deploy; that gives you a bit more assurance from DataStax who offer commercial support.
Then there is DataStax Enterprise, which is the version that you pay to use, with a support model included. This still uses open source Cassandra, with additional code from DataStax. They have also put this release through their internal test processes, so that they are happy to support it. That generally means the releases will lag that Apache and Community versions, if that matters to you.
The DataStax 'Dev Center' product is a GUI tool that allows you to enter CQL commands against a Cassandra installation - it is free to use against any release. You may find it useful, though the CQLSH command-line should offer much of what you may need (and Cassandra CLI).
The DataStax 'Ops Center' product is available in a free version, which can run against any Cassandra with the associated 'DataStax Agent' used to collect data from each node. The Enterprise version of Ops Center includes additional functionality; that is available if you purchase the fully support DSE (DataStax Enterprise) stack.
Hope that helps. Much more information available at Planet Cassandra and the DataStax web sites.

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Besides Apache Cassandra, there's Scylla which is a drop in replacement for Cassandra written in C++. It claims to be 10 times faster than Apache Cassandra. However, Scylla is still in alpha version, and you should stay away from it in a production environment.
Scylla aims to support all cassandra features together with toolings. It also supports JMX monitoring.

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4Note that the key here is "aims to support" - Scylla doesn't support indexes, counters, thrift, all of the jmx endpoints, and probably dozens of other things nobody has tested, and if you go look through the source, you'll find dozens or hundreds of #if 0 an FIXME blocks, because clearly it's not done, which means it's not viable, which means it's not really worth calling it a drop in replacement at this point. – Jeff Jirsa Oct 22 '15 at 05:36
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@JeffJirsa Yes, I forgot to mention that Scylla is still alpha version only. But it will be interesting once it is production ready. – Minh Pham Oct 22 '15 at 10:59
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1Scylla is now in beta and a GA release (for production) is planned for this first quarter (2016 q1) - worth keeping a look at it – Abu Junayd Mar 28 '16 at 02:33
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Apache Cassandra also have all features as well as community edition of DataStax . So you can put Apache Cassandra on Production enivorment .

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Another good feature of DSE is the ability to do backup and recovery of your Cassandra database which I would think is very important if you are planning to use this in a production setup.

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1You can use nodetool snapshot to take a backup to take a backup, see: https://docs.datastax.com/en/cassandra/2.0/cassandra/operations/ops_backup_takes_snapshot_t.html – Andy Cobley Jun 09 '16 at 12:08