Benchmarking Cassandra

Abstract

With the increasing need for the storage of unstructured data, the demand for NoSQL databases has grown. The most widely used NoSQL database is the column-based Cassandra. While the usage of Cassandra has expanded, evaluating its performance has become crucial for applications utilizing Cassandra at scale for storage. Furthermore, Cassandra is being applied to a diverse range of applications that significantly differ from traditional serving workloads. The rise of emerging cloud serving systems and the wide range of proposed applications, coupled with a lack of performance comparisons, makes it difficult to understand the trade-offs between systems and the workloads for which they are best suited. This work aims to benchmark Cassandra, with the goal of facilitating performance comparisons between different versions of Cassandra, while using YCSB to generate various workloads. We define a core set of benchmarks and report the results for Cassandra, evaluating it against various performance parameters.