Is Cassandra ready for prime time yet?

I started looking into Cassandra and I am really impressed with what it provides, but at the same time I read about how Reddit had a fire drill after migrating to Cassandra, and about twitter deciding to not using it for tweets. Although those were about a year ago or so, I am wondering if the latest ver开发者_开发技巧sion is ready for prime time yet?

Netflix has talked extensively about how they are moving from Oracle and SimpleDB entirely to Cassandra.

Twitter was also at the Cassandra Summit a few weeks ago talking about how they use Cassandra for multiple projects; Reddit had some early problems with being under-capacity, but later said, "Our traffic more than tripled [in 2010], and the transparent scalability afforded to us by Apache Cassandra is in large part what allowed us to do it on our limited resources."

There are many other companies using Cassandra (and DataStax customers are the tip of the iceberg).

In short, Cassandra is solving real problems for real companies. Just don't go into it expecting MySQL and you'll be fine. The DataStax documentation is a good starting point.

(Chris is mistaken about API stability: we were clear that after 0.7 we would be strict about maintaining backwards compatibility, and we have, even for "maintenance" operations like schema updates and mixed-version cluster operation for downtime-free upgrades. I would also note that unlike many "NoSQL" databases, Cassandra has always taken data durability seriously.)

Cassandra is still under very heavy development. The API is still changing, and in that respect, no the product isn't stable. There are still occasional glitches, and a number of kinks to be worked out. It is still a very young product with a long way to reach before actual maturity.

Having said that, Cassandra is quite capable, provided that you are capable of structuring your data in a manner suited to Cassandra's strong points. In other words, if you play to Cassandra's strengths I think you'll find that it's "mature enough" at this point. There are already a number of large sites that use cassandra, and in this regard it's certainly ready for "prime time" (whatever that really means).

It will be years (if ever) before it has the same reputation and stability as a traditional DBMS like MySQL.