I've used MongoDB extensively (for the past 6 months), building a hierarchical data management system, and I can vouch for both the ease of setup (install it, run it, use it!) and the speed. As long as you think about indexes carefully, it can absolutely scream along, speed-wise.
I gather that Cassandra, due to its use with large-scale projects like Twitter, has better scaling functionality, although the MongoDB team is working on parity there. I should point out that I've not used Cassandra beyond the trial-run stage, so I can't speak for the detail.
The real swinger for me, when we were assessing NoSQL databases, was the querying - Cassandra is basically just a giant key/value store, and querying is a bit fiddly (at least compared to MongoDB), so for performance you'd have to duplicate quite a lot of data as a sort of manual index. MongoDB, on the other hand, uses a "query by example" model.
For example, say you've got a Collection (MongoDB parlance for the equivalent to a RDMS table) containing Users. MongoDB stores records as Documents, which are basically binary JSON objects. e.g:
{
FirstName: "John",
LastName: "Smith",
Email: "john@smith.com",
Groups: ["Admin", "User", "SuperUser"]
}
If you wanted to find all of the users called Smith who have Admin rights, you'd just create a new document (at the admin console using Javascript, or in production using the language of your choice):
{
LastName: "Smith",
Groups: "Admin"
}
...and then run the query. That's it. There are added operators for comparisons, RegEx filtering etc, but it's all pretty simple, and the Wiki-based documentation is pretty good.
