Learning Apache Cassandra - Second Edition

Comparing Cassandra to the alternatives

Now that you've got an in-depth understanding of the feature set that Cassandra offers, it's time to figure out which features are most important to you and which database is the best fit. The following table lists a handful of commonly used databases and key features that they do or don't have:

Feature	Cassandra	PostgreSQL	MongoDB	Redis	Riak
Structured records	Yes	Yes	Yes	Limited	No
Secondary indexes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	Yes
Discretely writable collections	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Relational joins	No	Yes	No	No	No
Built-in MapReduce	No	No	Yes	No	Yes
Fast result ordering	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Immediate consistency	Configurable at query level	Yes	Yes	Yes	Configurable at cluster level
Transparent sharding ...