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Cassandra vs InfluxDB: What are the differences?

Introduction

Cassandra and InfluxDB are both popular database management systems, but they differ in several key aspects.

  1. Data Model: Cassandra follows a wide column data model, also known as a columnar database, where data is organized in tables with dynamic row and column structures. InfluxDB, on the other hand, is a time-series database that focuses on storing and retrieving data with timestamps. It is optimized for handling time series data, making it more efficient for handling continuous data streams.

  2. Scalability: Cassandra is designed to be highly scalable and can handle massive amounts of data. It has a decentralized architecture that allows for easy distribution across multiple nodes, making it suitable for high-volume and write-intensive applications. In contrast, while InfluxDB can also scale horizontally, it is better suited for scenarios with smaller data sizes and less emphasis on distributed computing.

  3. Query Language: Cassandra uses CQL (Cassandra Query Language), which is similar to SQL but has some unique syntax and functionality specific to Cassandra's data model. InfluxDB utilizes its own query language called InfluxQL, which is designed specifically for time-series data and provides functions for data aggregation, downsampling, and filtering.

  4. Performance: Cassandra is known for its robust performance and can handle high write and read loads efficiently. It is designed to provide low-latency response times, making it suitable for real-time applications. InfluxDB, being a specialized time-series database, offers excellent write and query performance for time-based data, making it ideal for analyzing and visualizing time-series metrics.

  5. Consistency: Cassandra offers tunable consistency, allowing developers to choose the level of consistency required for their applications. It provides both strong and eventual consistency models. InfluxDB, on the other hand, prioritizes eventual consistency to ensure high availability and fault tolerance, making it more suitable for scenarios where real-time consistency is not critical.

  6. Data Compression and Retention: Cassandra provides configurable compression options to optimize storage space. It supports both row-level and block-level compression techniques. InfluxDB, being a time-series database, provides built-in compression algorithms that efficiently store and compress time-stamped data. It also offers retention policies that allow automatic data expiration based on a specified time duration.

In summary, Cassandra and InfluxDB differ in their data models, scalability, query languages, performance characteristics, consistency models, and approaches to data compression and retention.

Advice on Cassandra and InfluxDB
Umair Iftikhar
Technical Architect at ERP Studio · | 3 upvotes · 451.4K views
Needs advice
on
CassandraCassandraDruidDruid
and
TimescaleDBTimescaleDB

Developing a solution that collects Telemetry Data from different devices, nearly 1000 devices minimum and maximum 12000. Each device is sending 2 packets in 1 second. This is time-series data, and this data definition and different reports are saved on PostgreSQL. Like Building information, maintenance records, etc. I want to know about the best solution. This data is required for Math and ML to run different algorithms. Also, data is raw without definitions and information stored in PostgreSQL. Initially, I went with TimescaleDB due to PostgreSQL support, but to increase in sites, I started facing many issues with timescale DB in terms of flexibility of storing data.

My major requirement is also the replication of the database for reporting and different purposes. You may also suggest other options other than Druid and Cassandra. But an open source solution is appreciated.

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Replies (1)
Recommends
on
MongoDBMongoDB

Hi Umair, Did you try MongoDB. We are using MongoDB on a production environment and collecting data from devices like your scenario. We have a MongoDB cluster with three replicas. Data from devices are being written to the master node and real-time dashboard UI is using the secondary nodes for read operations. With this setup write operations are not affected by read operations too.

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Needs advice
on
HadoopHadoopInfluxDBInfluxDB
and
KafkaKafka

I have a lot of data that's currently sitting in a MariaDB database, a lot of tables that weigh 200gb with indexes. Most of the large tables have a date column which is always filtered, but there are usually 4-6 additional columns that are filtered and used for statistics. I'm trying to figure out the best tool for storing and analyzing large amounts of data. Preferably self-hosted or a cheap solution. The current problem I'm running into is speed. Even with pretty good indexes, if I'm trying to load a large dataset, it's pretty slow.

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Replies (1)
Recommends
on
DruidDruid

Druid Could be an amazing solution for your use case, My understanding, and the assumption is you are looking to export your data from MariaDB for Analytical workload. It can be used for time series database as well as a data warehouse and can be scaled horizontally once your data increases. It's pretty easy to set up on any environment (Cloud, Kubernetes, or Self-hosted nix system). Some important features which make it a perfect solution for your use case. 1. It can do streaming ingestion (Kafka, Kinesis) as well as batch ingestion (Files from Local & Cloud Storage or Databases like MySQL, Postgres). In your case MariaDB (which has the same drivers to MySQL) 2. Columnar Database, So you can query just the fields which are required, and that runs your query faster automatically. 3. Druid intelligently partitions data based on time and time-based queries are significantly faster than traditional databases. 4. Scale up or down by just adding or removing servers, and Druid automatically rebalances. Fault-tolerant architecture routes around server failures 5. Gives ana amazing centralized UI to manage data sources, query, tasks.

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Needs advice
on
InfluxDBInfluxDBMongoDBMongoDB
and
TimescaleDBTimescaleDB

We are building an IOT service with heavy write throughput and fewer reads (we need downsampling records). We prefer to have good reliability when comes to data and prefer to have data retention based on policies.

So, we are looking for what is the best underlying DB for ingesting a lot of data and do queries easily

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Replies (3)
Yaron Lavi
Recommends
on
PostgreSQLPostgreSQL

We had a similar challenge. We started with DynamoDB, Timescale, and even InfluxDB and Mongo - to eventually settle with PostgreSQL. Assuming the inbound data pipeline in queued (for example, Kinesis/Kafka -> S3 -> and some Lambda functions), PostgreSQL gave us a We had a similar challenge. We started with DynamoDB, Timescale and even InfluxDB and Mongo - to eventually settle with PostgreSQL. Assuming the inbound data pipeline in queued (for example, Kinesis/Kafka -> S3 -> and some Lambda functions), PostgreSQL gave us better performance by far.

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Recommends
on
DruidDruid

Druid is amazing for this use case and is a cloud-native solution that can be deployed on any cloud infrastructure or on Kubernetes. - Easy to scale horizontally - Column Oriented Database - SQL to query data - Streaming and Batch Ingestion - Native search indexes It has feature to work as TimeSeriesDB, Datawarehouse, and has Time-optimized partitioning.

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Ankit Malik
Software Developer at CloudCover · | 3 upvotes · 355K views
Recommends
on
Google BigQueryGoogle BigQuery

if you want to find a serverless solution with capability of a lot of storage and SQL kind of capability then google bigquery is the best solution for that.

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Vinay Mehta
Needs advice
on
CassandraCassandra
and
ScyllaDBScyllaDB

The problem I have is - we need to process & change(update/insert) 55M Data every 2 min and this updated data to be available for Rest API for Filtering / Selection. Response time for Rest API should be less than 1 sec.

The most important factors for me are processing and storing time of 2 min. There need to be 2 views of Data One is for Selection & 2. Changed data.

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Replies (4)
Recommends
on
ScyllaDBScyllaDB

Scylla can handle 1M/s events with a simple data model quite easily. The api to query is CQL, we have REST api but that's for control/monitoring

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Alex Peake
Recommends
on
CassandraCassandra

Cassandra is quite capable of the task, in a highly available way, given appropriate scaling of the system. Remember that updates are only inserts, and that efficient retrieval is only by key (which can be a complex key). Talking of keys, make sure that the keys are well distributed.

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Pankaj Soni
Chief Technical Officer at Software Joint · | 2 upvotes · 163.5K views
Recommends
on
CassandraCassandra

i love syclla for pet projects however it's license which is based on server model is an issue. thus i recommend cassandra

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Recommends
on
ScyllaDBScyllaDB

By 55M do you mean 55 million entity changes per 2 minutes? It is relatively high, means almost 460k per second. If I had to choose between Scylla or Cassandra, I would opt for Scylla as it is promising better performance for simple operations. However, maybe it would be worth to consider yet another alternative technology. Take into consideration required consistency, reliability and high availability and you may realize that there are more suitable once. Rest API should not be the main driver, because you can always develop the API yourself, if not supported by given technology.

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Decisions about Cassandra and InfluxDB
Micha Mailänder
CEO & Co-Founder at Dechea · | 14 upvotes · 87K views

Fauna is a serverless database where you store data as JSON. Also, you have build in a HTTP GraphQL interface with a full authentication & authorization layer. That means you can skip your Backend and call it directly from the Frontend. With the power, that you can write data transformation function within Fauna with her own language called FQL, we're getting a blazing fast application.

Also, Fauna takes care about scaling and backups (All data are sharded on three different locations on the globe). That means we can fully focus on writing business logic and don't have to worry anymore about infrastructure.

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Benoit Larroque
Principal Engineer at Sqreen · | 2 upvotes · 145.9K views

I chose TimescaleDB because to be the backend system of our production monitoring system. We needed to be able to keep track of multiple high cardinality dimensions.

The drawbacks of this decision are our monitoring system is a bit more ad hoc than it used to (New Relic Insights)

We are combining this with Grafana for display and Telegraf for data collection

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Pros of Cassandra
Pros of InfluxDB
  • 119
    Distributed
  • 98
    High performance
  • 81
    High availability
  • 74
    Easy scalability
  • 53
    Replication
  • 26
    Reliable
  • 26
    Multi datacenter deployments
  • 10
    Schema optional
  • 9
    OLTP
  • 8
    Open source
  • 2
    Workload separation (via MDC)
  • 1
    Fast
  • 59
    Time-series data analysis
  • 30
    Easy setup, no dependencies
  • 24
    Fast, scalable & open source
  • 21
    Open source
  • 20
    Real-time analytics
  • 6
    Continuous Query support
  • 5
    Easy Query Language
  • 4
    HTTP API
  • 4
    Out-of-the-box, automatic Retention Policy
  • 1
    Offers Enterprise version
  • 1
    Free Open Source version

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Cons of Cassandra
Cons of InfluxDB
  • 3
    Reliability of replication
  • 1
    Size
  • 1
    Updates
  • 4
    Instability
  • 1
    Proprietary query language
  • 1
    HA or Clustering is only in paid version

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What is Cassandra?

Partitioning means that Cassandra can distribute your data across multiple machines in an application-transparent matter. Cassandra will automatically repartition as machines are added and removed from the cluster. Row store means that like relational databases, Cassandra organizes data by rows and columns. The Cassandra Query Language (CQL) is a close relative of SQL.

What is InfluxDB?

InfluxDB is a scalable datastore for metrics, events, and real-time analytics. It has a built-in HTTP API so you don't have to write any server side code to get up and running. InfluxDB is designed to be scalable, simple to install and manage, and fast to get data in and out.

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What companies use Cassandra?
What companies use InfluxDB?
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What are some alternatives to Cassandra and InfluxDB?
HBase
Apache HBase is an open-source, distributed, versioned, column-oriented store modeled after Google' Bigtable: A Distributed Storage System for Structured Data by Chang et al. Just as Bigtable leverages the distributed data storage provided by the Google File System, HBase provides Bigtable-like capabilities on top of Apache Hadoop.
Google Cloud Bigtable
Google Cloud Bigtable offers you a fast, fully managed, massively scalable NoSQL database service that's ideal for web, mobile, and Internet of Things applications requiring terabytes to petabytes of data. Unlike comparable market offerings, Cloud Bigtable doesn't require you to sacrifice speed, scale, or cost efficiency when your applications grow. Cloud Bigtable has been battle-tested at Google for more than 10 years—it's the database driving major applications such as Google Analytics and Gmail.
Hadoop
The Apache Hadoop software library is a framework that allows for the distributed processing of large data sets across clusters of computers using simple programming models. It is designed to scale up from single servers to thousands of machines, each offering local computation and storage.
Redis
Redis is an open source (BSD licensed), in-memory data structure store, used as a database, cache, and message broker. Redis provides data structures such as strings, hashes, lists, sets, sorted sets with range queries, bitmaps, hyperloglogs, geospatial indexes, and streams.
Couchbase
Developed as an alternative to traditionally inflexible SQL databases, the Couchbase NoSQL database is built on an open source foundation and architected to help developers solve real-world problems and meet high scalability demands.
See all alternatives