Head, Data Integration & Management at a non-profit with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Top 10
Oct 31, 2025
Regarding areas of improvement for Cassandra, currently, we are not facing significant issues. Some issues arise from our vendors like Apache slowness and distribution or load balancing from HAProxy, which should better handle consumption for high-level concurrency. I think it would be great to have a better open plugin library, where any kind of Apache could be included in Cassandra database, as well as a built-in Apache library, which would be better for Cassandra optimization or publication.
While Cassandra can handle NoSQL, I think there should be more flexibility for whole schema design when data is stored in wide columns. Additionally, I believe that eventual consistency should be enhanced.
Software Engineer at a tech services company with 201-500 employees
Real User
Top 10
Feb 27, 2025
Cassandra is very complex to manage. Sometimes, I need to involve a senior DevOps engineer if we encounter a problem. About a year ago, we were unable to recover data without help from a senior DevOps engineer. If we encounter some errors, we are unable to run Cassandra, and it goes down.
VP odfTechnology at Enterpi Software Solutions Private Limited
User
Top 5
Jan 24, 2025
We found some issues with the batch inserts when the data volume is large. Batch insertion is needed when I want to insert a million records at a time. We have some settings for batch inserting compared to other databases. Batching bulk data can cause performance issues.
We experience configuration issues when accommodating the volumes we require, which often necessitates consultation with the Cassandra development team. This aspect is room for improvement. Additionally, the initial setup was complicated and required a lot of back-and-forth questioning. The documentation could be improved to better reflect exceptional use cases.
I want Cassandra to update its open-source version more quickly. It's already feature-rich, but I'd appreciate better integration with other NoSQL databases like MariaDB or MongoDB. If I ever need to work with customers or vendors using different NoSQL databases, having native integration in Cassandra would make managing and interacting with their databases much easier.
There were challenges with the query language and the development interface. The query language, in particular, could be improved for better optimization. These challenges were encountered while using the Java SDK.
The product is a NoSQL database. While working with it, we have to structure the table the way we want the query. We cannot get data from another table because, in Cassandra, we do not have any joins. Depending upon our schema, we can't make ORDER BY or GROUP BY clauses in the product. We should know the data we want before making the table. Only after that we can create the table. Or else we will face issues with our server, and we will have to fetch all the data and compute it in the programming language. It will become messy. It is the main drawback of the solution.
Senior System Integration Engineer at a tech consulting company with 5,001-10,000 employees
Real User
Dec 20, 2022
The stability of the solution and the documentation available can be improved. The solution is limited to a linear performance, which should be improved in the next release.
Senior Database Engineer at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
Real User
May 18, 2022
Cassandra can improve by adding more built-in tools. For example, if you want to do some maintenance activities in the cluster, we have to depend on third-party tools. Having these tools build-in would be e benefit.
If you have a requirement of aggregation and joints, Cassandra doesn't support a solution that can give the aggregation. If they were to include these two areas, the aggregation and the complex joints, it would improve the solution a great deal.
Chief Technology Officer at a comms service provider with 1-10 employees
Real User
Mar 9, 2022
The secondary index in Cassandra was a bit problematic and could be improved. Cassandra can improve by having an ecosystem integrator that was more complete. For example, in some maintenance operations, we needed to deploy external tools to perform tasks that were not packaged alongside Cassandra.
One of the issues with the solution is that you cannot drop write like you're able to in MongoDB and MySQL, where you can join tables. Cassandra doesn't have joins between tables so you need other tools for that. You need to read all the data and put in memory and then add the joins. That is the area where I think they need improvement. Secondly, for example, when setting up your cursor, you have to be very sure about the read mechanism, because if you're not following the read mechanism and mistakenly build a key that is no longer unique then you start overriding data. There are a lot of improvements they could make including on the OS.
Managing Director at a tech services company with 1-10 employees
Real User
May 25, 2020
The interface could definitely be improved. It's a technical database and for me the features are not user friendly. I also think it's quite an expensive solution and I hope over time with more implementations, this will improve.
Cassandra is a distributed and scalable database management system used for real-time data processing.
It is highly valued for its ability to handle large amounts of data, scalability, high availability, fault tolerance, and flexible data model.
It is commonly used in finance, e-commerce, and social media industries.
Regarding areas of improvement for Cassandra, currently, we are not facing significant issues. Some issues arise from our vendors like Apache slowness and distribution or load balancing from HAProxy, which should better handle consumption for high-level concurrency. I think it would be great to have a better open plugin library, where any kind of Apache could be included in Cassandra database, as well as a built-in Apache library, which would be better for Cassandra optimization or publication.
While Cassandra can handle NoSQL, I think there should be more flexibility for whole schema design when data is stored in wide columns. Additionally, I believe that eventual consistency should be enhanced.
Cassandra is very complex to manage. Sometimes, I need to involve a senior DevOps engineer if we encounter a problem. About a year ago, we were unable to recover data without help from a senior DevOps engineer. If we encounter some errors, we are unable to run Cassandra, and it goes down.
We found some issues with the batch inserts when the data volume is large. Batch insertion is needed when I want to insert a million records at a time. We have some settings for batch inserting compared to other databases. Batching bulk data can cause performance issues.
We experience configuration issues when accommodating the volumes we require, which often necessitates consultation with the Cassandra development team. This aspect is room for improvement. Additionally, the initial setup was complicated and required a lot of back-and-forth questioning. The documentation could be improved to better reflect exceptional use cases.
I want Cassandra to update its open-source version more quickly. It's already feature-rich, but I'd appreciate better integration with other NoSQL databases like MariaDB or MongoDB. If I ever need to work with customers or vendors using different NoSQL databases, having native integration in Cassandra would make managing and interacting with their databases much easier.
There were challenges with the query language and the development interface. The query language, in particular, could be improved for better optimization. These challenges were encountered while using the Java SDK.
The product is a NoSQL database. While working with it, we have to structure the table the way we want the query. We cannot get data from another table because, in Cassandra, we do not have any joins. Depending upon our schema, we can't make ORDER BY or GROUP BY clauses in the product. We should know the data we want before making the table. Only after that we can create the table. Or else we will face issues with our server, and we will have to fetch all the data and compute it in the programming language. It will become messy. It is the main drawback of the solution.
The stability of the solution and the documentation available can be improved. The solution is limited to a linear performance, which should be improved in the next release.
It can be difficult to analyze what's going on inside of the database relative to other databases. It can also be difficult to troubleshoot sometimes.
Cassandra can improve by adding more built-in tools. For example, if you want to do some maintenance activities in the cluster, we have to depend on third-party tools. Having these tools build-in would be e benefit.
If you have a requirement of aggregation and joints, Cassandra doesn't support a solution that can give the aggregation. If they were to include these two areas, the aggregation and the complex joints, it would improve the solution a great deal.
The secondary index in Cassandra was a bit problematic and could be improved. Cassandra can improve by having an ecosystem integrator that was more complete. For example, in some maintenance operations, we needed to deploy external tools to perform tasks that were not packaged alongside Cassandra.
The solution is not easy to use because it is a big database and you have to learn the interface. This is the case though in most of these solutions.
One of the issues with the solution is that you cannot drop write like you're able to in MongoDB and MySQL, where you can join tables. Cassandra doesn't have joins between tables so you need other tools for that. You need to read all the data and put in memory and then add the joins. That is the area where I think they need improvement. Secondly, for example, when setting up your cursor, you have to be very sure about the read mechanism, because if you're not following the read mechanism and mistakenly build a key that is no longer unique then you start overriding data. There are a lot of improvements they could make including on the OS.
We actually find HBase to be faster and better than Cassandra. The disc space is lacking. You need to free it up as you are working.
For my use case, it was more than sufficient. I used most of the features, whatever was available. I'm not sure what else can be improved.
The interface could definitely be improved. It's a technical database and for me the features are not user friendly. I also think it's quite an expensive solution and I hope over time with more implementations, this will improve.