Cassandra Release Brings Speed Boost: Beginning of the End for MySQL?

The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) has pushed out the 0.6 release of Cassandra with support for Apache Hadoop, and several improvements to the Cassandra architecture and speed. Don't let the release number fool you, Cassandra is in production use on some of the busiest sites on the Web, and may be giving MySQL a run for its money soon.
Cassandra is a NoSQL distributed database that was originally developed and open sourced by Facebook and is now used by Rackspace, Digg, Twitter, and many others. The project was picked up by the Apache Software Foundation's incubator project in 2009 and became a top-level project in February of this year. The 0.6 release is the first since graduating from ASF's Incubator.

The big news with 0.6 is the support for Hadoop and the speed improvements. Cassandra is being deployed by services dealing with thousands, maybe millions, of users making requests every second. The 0.6 release notes claim a 30% improvement in speed, which means maybe a little less Fail Whale and a little more Tweet goodness.
The Hadoop support adds the ability to run Hadoop queries against data in Cassandra. Prior to 0.6, you could insert Hadoop output to Cassandra, but this release brings native support and makes it much easier for the applications to work together.
Cassandra has been growing by leaps and bounds, and may be one of the projects where development moves faster than hype. Trying to get a grip on Cassandra, and what it can (and can't) do? Jonathan Ellis put up a nice fact vs. fiction piece last week talking about some of the misconceptions around Cassandra. He also rounds up some of the Cassandra deployments and addresses the question of Cassandra vs. MySQL saying "if not quite yet the end, then the beginning of it."
The rise of NoSQL solutions like Cassandra coupled with Oracle's acquisition of MySQL may do quite a bit to dent the growth of MySQL. It's unlikely to spell the "end" for MySQL, but it seems unlikely that MySQL is going to continue to see much growth -- particularly in large-scale deployments. But I'd be interested in hearing from admins and developers working with MySQL that feel differently.

Posted in: Software