MongoDB vs Cassandra | Complete comparison in 2022

The rise of unstructured/semi-structured data leads to the increase in the popularity of No-SQL databases. In this session, we will be comparing the two most popular No-SQL databases, MongoDB vs Cassandra. We will make a detailed comparison between MongoDB and Cassandra and understand when to choose one over another.

What is MongoDB

Mongodb is one of the most popular open-source, No-SQL databases.MongoDB is non-relational and can have a dynamic schema that enables users to insert the data into MongoDB without defining the schema.

In MongoDB, users have the flexibility to define the schema to force users to insert data having particular fields. Operational, transactional, and analytical workloads can be easily managed using MongoDB.

MongoDB uses the BSON format to represent the data. More details about MongoDB can be found here

Mongodb also has an enterprise version, which provides more features and enterprise support than the open-source mongoDB version.

What is Cassandra

Cassandra is a NO-SQL database that is entirely open-source. Cassandra is a distributed and wide column store database management system.

Avinash Lakshman and Prashant Malik developed Cassandra at Facebook and later open-sourced it to Apache Software Foundation in 2008.

Apache Cassandra is a highly-performance and scalable database which can handle enormous amounts of data spread across many commodity servers.

Features of MongoDB vs Cassandra

Features ofMongoDB

Please follow this link to learn about the features of mongodb.

Features ofCassandra

The Important features ofCassandra are as follows:

• Open source: Cassandra is entirely free and open source. You can download Cassandra from their website without paying anything.
• Distributed: The data in Cassandra is distributed across multiple nodes on the cluster.
• Highly Scalable: Cassandra can be easily scalable by adding more nodes to the cluster, improving read-write.
• Fault tolerance: Data In Cassandra is replicated across multiple nodes, which saves the data and cluster from a single point of failure.
• CQL Query Language: We can access or query the data saved in Cassandra using the CQL(Cassandra Query Language), which is relatively easy to understand.

Advantages and Disadvantages ofMongoDB vs Cassandra

Advantages ofMongoDB

Please follow this link to learn about the Advantage of Mongodb.

Advantages ofCassandra

The Advantages ofCassandra are as follows:

• Instead of master-slave architecture, Cassandra has a peer-to-peer architecture. Hence there s no single point of failure in Cassandra.
• One of the other advantages of using Cassandra is its scalability. Cassandra’s cluster can be easily scaled up or scaled down based on the need without affecting the entire cluster.
• Cassandra is highly available and faults tolerance.
• Cassandra is a column-oriented database that saves data into columns.
• Cassandra is a high-performance database, and it provides high performance for large datasets.

Disadvantages of MongoDB

Please follow this link to learn about the disadvantage of Mongodb.

Disadvantages of Cassandra

The Disadvantages ofCassandra are as follows:

• In Cassandra, there is no support for acid properties.
• Cassandra does not support joins
• There is no support for aggregation on Cassandra.
• If the data size is huge, Cassandra takes a lot of time to read and write, which ultimately leads to a latency issue

MongoDB vs Cassandra

In this session, we will make a detailed comparison ofMongoDB vs Cassandra.

MongoDB vsCassandra general differences

The general difference between MongoDB vsCassandra are:

MongoDB vsCassandra scalability

When selecting any database, scalability is one of the most features people consider when choosing any database.

Though MongoDB and Cassandra can be easily scalable in MongoDB, only one node is a master, others are slaves, and only the master can perform the read-write operation. On the other hand, in Cassandra, multiple servers act as a master.

So choose Cassandra over MongoDB if data writing speed and scalability are your priority.

MongoDB vsCassandra Query language

Apache Cassandra supports a Cassandra Query Language (CQL), using which we can interact with Cassandra. The CQL is relatively easy to learn and implement. On the other hand, we can query the mongodb by JSON query.

A sample query to insert a record into an Apache Cassandra is:

INSERT INTO product (product_id, product_name, price) 
VALUES(123, 'iphone xr', 50000)

To insert a record intoMongoDB, type the below command

db.product.insert(
       { 
         product_id: 123, 
         product_name: 'iphone xr', 
         price: 50000, 
       }
)

You can check the blog on mongodb commands to have a basic idea about all mongodb commands

MongoDB vsCassandra programming language support

Users can interact with mongodb using mongodb drivers. Mongodb has drivers for most of the programming languages. The list of programming languages supported by mongodb are

• C
• C++
• C#
• GO
• Java
• Node.js
• PHP
• Python
• Ruby
• Rust
• Scala
• Swift

you can check this blog on mongodb with python to understand how to interact with mongodb using python.

The list of programming languages supported by Apache Cassandra are:

• C#
• C++
• Go
• Scala
• Java
• Python
• Perl
• Ruby
• Scala

Cassandra supports a comparatively lesser number of programming languages as compared to mongodb.

MongoDB vsCassandra usability

For ease of use, mongodb has the edge over Cassandra, but Cassandra has recently made good progress and added more features to CQL(Cassandra query language).Cassandra’s team has tried to makeCQL syntax similar to SQL syntax.

On the other hand, mongodb is a clear winner when it comes tousability due to simple JSON syntax, which lets you effortlessly interact with mongodb.

MongoDB vsCassandra Performance

When comparing the two databases user needs to keep in mind various factors that affect the performance. Some of these factors are:

• Database model
• Load characteristics
• Consistency requirements 
• Data load
• System configuration

In most of thePerformance testing, Cassandra shines over MongoDB in write-intensive operations. You can read this research paper to understand theMongoDB vsCassandra Performance in multiple scenarios.

MongoDB vsCassandra: which one to choose

In this session, we will understand how to choose one database over another. When selecting any database first thing to keep in mind is how much data you are handling.

• If data availability is your priority chooseCassandra overMongodb as Cassandra has an edge over MongoDB when It comes to dataavailability
• Choose MongoDB if you are handling unstructured or varying schema data as MongoDB is more for handlingvarying schema data
• Choose MongoDB if you need to perform high-speed caching and logging.
• Mongodb is best suited for Real-time analytics use cases.
• MongoDB is very great for fast query times since mongodb supports the secondary indexes feature.
• Choose Cassandra when data operations as scaling rapidly

Conclusion

In this article, we have started with a brief introduction to MongoDB and Cassandra. We also explored the advantages, disadvantages, and features of MongoDB and Cassandra. Finally, we have seen the difference between MongoDB and Cassandra and when to choose one over another.

I hope you like this tutorial. Please do let me know in the comment box if you face any difficulty.

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