Best Columnar Databases for Apache Spark

The Apache Cassandra database is the right choice when you need scalability and high availability without compromising performance. Linear scalability and proven fault-tolerance on commodity hardware or cloud infrastructure make it the perfect platform for mission-critical data. Cassandra's support for replicating across multiple datacenters is best-in-class, providing lower latency for your users and the peace of mind of knowing that you can survive regional outages.

We make BI & Big Data analytics work easier and faster. Our goal is to empower business users and make always-busy business and heavily loaded BI specialists less dependent on each other when solving data-driven business problems. If you have ever experienced a lack of data you needed, time to consuming report generation or long queue to your BI expert, consider Querona. Querona uses a built-in Big Data engine to handle growing data volumes. Repeatable queries can be cached or calculated in advance. Optimization needs less effort as Querona automatically suggests query improvements. Querona empowers business analysts and data scientists by putting self-service in their hands. They can easily discover and prototype data models, add new data sources, experiment with query optimization and dig in raw data. Less IT is needed. Now users can get live data no matter where it is stored. If databases are too busy to be queried live, Querona will cache the data.

Use Apache HBase™ when you need random, realtime read/write access to your Big Data. This project's goal is the hosting of very large tables -- billions of rows X millions of columns -- atop clusters of commodity hardware. Automatic failover support between RegionServers. Easy to use Java API for client access. Thrift gateway and a REST-ful Web service that supports XML, Protobuf, and binary data encoding options. Support for exporting metrics via the Hadoop metrics subsystem to files or Ganglia; or via JMX.

Google Cloud Bigtable is a fully managed, scalable NoSQL database service for large analytical and operational workloads. Fast and performant: Use Cloud Bigtable as the storage engine that grows with you from your first gigabyte to petabyte-scale for low-latency applications as well as high-throughput data processing and analytics. Seamless scaling and replication: Start with a single node per cluster, and seamlessly scale to hundreds of nodes dynamically supporting peak demand. Replication also adds high availability and workload isolation for live serving apps. Simple and integrated: Fully managed service that integrates easily with big data tools like Hadoop, Dataflow, and Dataproc. Plus, support for the open source HBase API standard makes it easy for development teams to get started.

A Kudu cluster stores tables that look just like tables you're used to from relational (SQL) databases. A table can be as simple as a binary key and value, or as complex as a few hundred different strongly-typed attributes. Just like SQL, every table has a primary key made up of one or more columns. This might be a single column like a unique user identifier, or a compound key such as a (host, metric, timestamp) tuple for a machine time-series database. Rows can be efficiently read, updated, or deleted by their primary key. Kudu's simple data model makes it a breeze to port legacy applications or build new ones, no need to worry about how to encode your data into binary blobs or make sense of a huge database full of hard-to-interpret JSON. Tables are self-describing, so you can use standard tools like SQL engines or Spark to analyze your data. Kudu's APIs are designed to be easy to use.