Testing Cassandra compatible APIs

by Pythian Marketing on Feb 19, 2019 12:00:00 AM

In this quick blog post, I’m going to assess how the databases that advertise themselves as “Cassandra API-compatible” fare in the compatibility department. But that is all I will do, only API testing, and not an extensive testing, just based on the APIs I see used often. Based on this, you can start building an informed decision on whether or not to change databases. The contenders:

Apache Cassandra 4.0
- Installation: Build from Source
Yugabyte - https://www.yugabyte.com/
- “YCQL is a transactional flexible-schema API that is compatible with the Cassandra Query Language (CQL). “
- Installation: Docker
ScyllaDB - https://www.scylladb.com/
- “Apache Cassandra’s wire protocol, a rich polyglot of drivers, and integration with Spark, Presto, and Graph tools make for resource-efficient and performance-effective coding.”
- Installation: Docker
Azure Cosmos - https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/cosmos-db/
- “Azure Cosmos DB provides native support for NoSQL and OSS APIs including MongoDB, Cassandra, Gremlin and SQL”
- Installation: Azure Portal Wizard

All installations were done with the containers as they are provided. Cosmos DB used all defaults as they were provided by the wizard interface. The CQL script used to test was this one: https://gist.github.com/cjrolo/f5f3cc02699c06ed1f4909d632d90f8f What I’m not doing on this blog post: performance testing, feature comparison and everything else that is not testing the API. Those might all be more or less important for other use cases, but that is not the scope of this blog.

What was tested

In this test, the following CQL APIs were tested:

Keyspace Creation
Table Creation
Adding a Column to a table (Alter table)
Data Insert
Data Insert with TTL (Time-to-live)
Data Insert with LWT (Lightweight Transactions)
Select Data
Select data with a full table scan (ALLOW FILTERING)
Creating a Secondary Index (2I)

Cassandra 4.0

All statements worked (as expected)

CosmosDB

LWT Not supported ALLOW FILTERING Not supported 2i Is Not supported

Scylla

LWT Not supported

Yugabyte

2i Not Supported

Results Table

So, with these results, which are not a full comparison (I have left out other parts offered in these systems), you can decide if it is compatible enough for you.

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