Apache Cassandra is an established open source, NoSQL database designed for handling workloads across commodity servers. So what applications is it now supporting?
The annual Cassandra Community survey has landed, revealing Cassandra’s evolving usage. Among respondents, 41 percent said Cassandra was their organization’s primary database, with more than 50 percent of enterprise data going through it. Over a third (34 percent) said 10 to 50 percent of their enterprise data was handled by Cassandra.
“Scalability” was cited by 78 percent of respondents as a reason for using the database, while 73 percent claimed it was down to “performance.”
Among multiple use cases at organizations, 47 percent use the database for time series data, and 34 percent use it for event logging. In addition, 31 percent use the platform for data aggregation.
Other significant uses include online retail/e-commerce, user activity tracking, user profile management, fraud detection, and backup and archiving.
In the future, 43 percent vowed to use Cassandra for AI workloads, and 38.5 percent planned to use it for machine learning workloads. Currently, 36 percent of users said they were already “experimenting” with the database to run at least one generative AI app.
In terms of data volumes, 30 percent currently run over 100 TB on Cassandra, and 27 percent handle 10 to 100 TB on it. Just under a quarter (23 percent) put 1 to 10 TB through it.
The survey found that 35 percent of Cassandra workloads were already in the cloud, and 25 percent of organizations pledged to put 10 to 50 percent of their workloads into the cloud over the next 12 months. Eight percent said they would be moving at least half of their workloads into the cloud in the next year.
Some 37 percent of Cassandra users had been using the platform for five to ten years, and nearly a fifth (18 percent) had used the database for upwards of ten years.
