NoSQL Cassandra gets SQL overlay

Another day brings another plucky company pitching a way to let a NoSQL system talk SQL. This time it's Acunu, which claimed on Monday to have cracked problems relating to querying data stored in the Facebook-blessed Cassandra NoSQL datastore. "With Cassandra the biggest problem we've seen users have was that data modelling …

[Anonymous Coward]

LULZ

I find the whole "bigdata", "NoSQL", "MapReduce" fiasco quite amusing. You need some data from a database. You read the specs grep the syntax and get your data. Putting data into a database? That's a different story. Though I find it hard to believe that a certain syntax makes developers expensive. I could also be ignorant of the ignorance.

[JeeBee]

I wouldn't be surprised if most developers using Cassandra are coding direct to the metal via the native Thrift API, or via the Hector or Astanyax APIs (and the non-Java equivalents), rather than using the newer, but far more limiting, CQL.

CQL simplifies some common use cases (think of it as SQL where the raw datatypes include collections as well as scalars). CQL 2 and CQL 3 don't sit well together, and in my testing they couldn't see data the other had inserted due to how they interpreted the database structure. IMO, avoid unless it handles your use case perfectly.

However people are interested in the replication and redundancy features of Cassandra despite having SQL-style problems, and maybe this solution will meet their requirements. It's got to be better than MySQL master-slave replication :-)