HBase vs Cassandra

Adku recently decided to migrate part of it's data to a NoSQL database in order to deal with increasing load on our MySQL database. We evaluated many options including MongoDB, Amazon SimpleDB, and a few others, but ultimately narrowed the options to just Cassandra and HBase. We experimented with both databases and evaluated them more deeply and ultimately decided to use Cassandra. This post explains the high level reasons why we chose Cassandra.

Disclaimer: While these decisions apply to Adku, they might not apply to your situation. Always do your own investigation and experimentation before choosing any large part of your system.

1. Reliability
   - We wrote a stress test tool to simulate how the databases would behave under high load. We used the default minimalistic configuration for each database following their respective documentations. Our stress test inserted 1 million rows of the full "Alice in Wonderland" text (~180kb) inserted into each row done continuously with one concurrent thread into a 3 node cluster. Surprisingly, the HBase region servers actually crashed on us consistently. Cassandra never crashed once. Although we would obviously scale the cluster under high loads and crashing nodes, this is still definitely concerning and a large win for Cassandra.
   
   
2. Performance
   - We also wrote a simulation tool to test a more realistic scenario to see how each database would respond. Similar to the above, our tool inserted 1 million rows with 2000 characters of ascii text inserted into each row done continuously with one concurrent thread into a 3 node cluster. HBase averaged 507 microseconds per write where Cassandra averaged 480 microseconds per write. We interpreted this as basically equivalent performance so there was no real winner here.
   
   
3. Consistency
   - Consistency is not a hard requirement for our specific use case so Cassandra's eventual consistency model is fine for us. If we do end up needing consistency, Cassandra can support it using their configurable CAP model, we would just have to take a performance hit. HBase has consistency so it is technically the winner here, but since it's not a hard requirement for us, it doesn't carry much weight.
   
   
4. Single Point of Failure
   - Hadoop's namenode which HBase depends on is a single point of failure. This means that if the namenode goes down, the entire database is unreachable. All Cassandra nodes are identical so there is no single point of failure. This is a win for Cassandra.
   
   
5. Hot Spot Problem
   - Our relevant row keys are currently all timestamps. HBase chooses the node to store data on by row key in sorted order. Cassandra by default stores them on a random node in random order. This means that HBase will fall into a hotspot problem where one node is handling most of the write traffic. Cassandra, however, distributes the load across all nodes evenly. This is a win for Cassandra.
   
   
6. MapReduce
   - HBase is built on top of HDFS and Hadoop. This means that MapReduce is very easy. Cassandra supports MapReduce, but doesn't support streaming MapReduce so you have to write them in Java. I'm also not sure what the relative performance is. Cassandra supports data locality so that MapReduces tasks end up processing data on the same machine as the MapReduce task so it's possible that performance is comparable, but I haven't done adequate tests. HBase is the winner here, but so far we haven't seen any drawbacks to running MapReduce on Cassandra (besides having to write in Java).
   
   
7. Simpler, Hackable
   - Cassandra is a simpler implementation and much easier to hack. This is the same reason why we chose Tornado instead of Apache as our web server and we've actually made quite a few modifications to the Tornado web server as a result. Bugs are also much easier to debug. HBase by comparison is much more complicated and harder to debug and hack. This is a win for Cassandra and we've even already submitted patches back into open source Cassandra.
   
   
8. Community Support
   - As of today, there are 175 users in the #cassandra channel on irc.freenode.net. HBase by comparison only has 74. Aside from IRC, it does appear that the Cassandra community is larger and more helpful than HBase. Another win for Cassandra.