Comparison Between Solr and Cassandra Database

Main Features of Apache Cassandra:

Peer to Peer Architecture

Cassandra follows a peer-to-peer architecture, instead of master-slave architecture. As all the machines are at equal level, any server can entertain request from any client, Undoubtedly, with its robust architecture and exceptional characteristics, Cassandra has raised the bar far above than other databases.

Elastic Scalability

Read and write throughput both increase linearly as new machines are added, with no downtime or interruption to applications.

High Performance

Cassandra has proven itself capable of delivering near real-time performance to support interactive, Web-based applications at scale. It does this through a combination of its ability to store and access data in columns, its ability to perform extremely fast inserts, its use of distributed counters, and its ability to take advantage of solid-state drives.

Optimal Case for using Apache Cassandra

When you are looking to built very heavy, distributed and highly scalable system and you might want as well to have quite responsive reporting system on top of that stored data, then Cassandra is your answer.

Integration with Hadoop

One interesting fact about Cassandra is that you can integrate it with Hadoop and Solr also which means you can easily build data intensive apps. Let understand through this example:

Build a system to ingest live application log data from hundreds of servers and make them searchable in near real-time through the web. This system must also generate Monthly, weekly KPI reports for the applications.

The components on the left and right look similar but the one on the left requires managing three separate distributed systems as well as managing the ETL between them. DSE, on the right, simplifies this setup by having one system that provides the same technology stack as the left but with much simpler operations and no custom ETL.

Apache Solr

Major Features of Apache Solr :

• Advanced Full-text search capabilities : It contains powerful matching capabilities like phrases, joins and grouping.
• Optimize for high volume traffic.
• Comprehensive administrative Interfaces : Solr built in with administrative user interfaces to make it easy to control Solr instances.
• Built on the battle-tested Apache Zookeeper, Solr makes it easy to scale up and down. Solr bakes in replication, distribution, rebalancing and fault tolerance out of the box.
• Solr publishes many well-defined extension points that make it easy to plugin both index and query time plugins.

Advantages of having Apache Solr for your projects:

• Performance improvements: Solr is written in Java, hence text comparison is much faster as solr is specifically written for indexing, result comparison, and full-text searching.
• Scalability: Solr can be set up on a different server from Apache/MySQL installations and queried against remotely as it uses REST interface. This allows search capabilities to scale independently from web/database servers.
• Faceting: Faceting is the ability to categorize content using a variety of different properties. On e-commerce store, it restricts results to a given manufacturer, price range, etc. This is particularly useful for content that has a lot of metadata associated with it (lots of taxonomy terms or fields for example).

Brief Comparison Between Cassandra and Solr

Conclusion :

Whether you choose to work on Apache Cassandra or Apache Solr, both the databases have a little difference between them and the final decision is highly based on the requirements of your project. But if you ask me then I’d say that A right selection of database can take your business to new heights of success. However, these two Database mentioned above are used worldwide, advanced and high performing. Depending on your business requirements and you can choose any database which suits you.