Astra DB vs. FirebirdSQL

We use Astra DB to improve our management systems. Storing data has become hassle-free and quite simple. When launching a Cassandra-based cloud application, Astra DB is exactly what you need. In addition to the standard training programs and videos, the extended support and training require significant additional effort to activate and cover which I feel is a bit more tedious task.

Incentivized

When looking for low maintenance and a solution suited for all kinds of pc applications. It is great when you are looking to store physical files in folder locations and you can then reference the document in the database. It has an open-source community around it along with documentation for third-party drivers of the development environment.

Incentivized

• We need to be able to process a lot of data (our biggest clients process hundreds of milions of transactions every month). However, it is not only the amount of data, it is also an unpredictable patterns with spikes occuring at different points of time - something athat Astra is great at.
• Our processing needs to be extremaly fast. Some of our clients use our enrichment in a synchronous way, meaning that any delay in processing is holding up the whole transaction lifecycle and can have a major impact on the client. Astra is very fast.
• A close collaboration with GCP makes our life very easy. All of our technology sits in Google Cloud, so having Astra in there makes it a no-brainer solution for us.

Incentivized

• Reliable RDMS for the SMB's and we found its performance is really fast.
• It allows us to store the physical files into the folder location and reference of the document in the database.
• Easy to take back-ups, and portable.

Incentivized

• Astra DB might be difficult to understand for people who are unfamiliar with Apache Cassandra. Improving the initial experience for newcomers, as well as offering better documentation and lessons, might be advantageous.
• The Astra DB ecosystem may be enhanced by expanding the ecosystem of plugins, integrations, and community-contributed solutions.

Incentivized

• Clustering features require alot of attention.
• Remote access can be quite slow.

Incentivized

Because it is free and usually zero maintenance. Just the issue of more difficult format updates in the future lower the rating a bit.

Incentivized

It's a great product but suffers with counters. This isn't a deal breaker but lets down what is otherwise a good all round solution

Incentivized

Usability has improved by unifying the architecture. The only thing's missing out of the box is a simple GUI DB tool for viewing DB contents and maybe running some SQL queries.

Incentivized

Their response time is fast, in case you do not contact them during business hours, they give a very good follow-up to your case. They also facilitate video calls if necessary for debugging.

Incentivized

This is an open source project. It provides a fair amount of free documentation and I think forums somewhere...

Incentivized

Even somebody just starting to use RDBMS himself should get it working quickly, at least if he's got a GUI tool and some SQL knowledge.

Incentivized

We also (briefly) considered building in-house. We wanted to avoid complex "Frankenstein" architectures. Combining Pinecone with another NoSQL datastore like DynamoDB would have increased complexity. A single-managed platform (Astra DB) enabled architectural simplicity and strong reliability, allowing Maester’s development team to prioritize high-value, customer-facing features

Incentivized

It is cost-effective, maintenance-free, easy to deploy and use on Linux and Windows environments and it works steadily. It has an open-source license. Installing Oracle was quite difficult in comparison to Firebird.

Incentivized

We are well aware of the Cassandra architecture and familiar with the open source tooling that Datastax provides the industry (K8sSandra / Stargate) to scale Cassandra on Kubernetes.

Having prior knowledge of Cassandra / Kubernetes means we know that under the hood Astra is built on infinitely scalable technologies. We trust that the foundations that Astra is built on will scale so we know Astra will scale.

Incentivized

• Database growth planning is less of a concern with Astra, as it scales automatically.
• Currently, they lack fine-grained security at the table level. I suspect that will change over time.
• If your load has peaks and valleys; Astra enables only paying for Reads/Writes; thus you do not need to pay for large servers to support peaks in load.

Incentivized

• The return on investment was of course because it freed us from paid relational databases.
• We have never experienced a negative situation.

Incentivized