The MIDDLE Management

During our conversations we were joined by Mani Srinivasan, Sr. Product Director at Datastax, in charge of the Datastax Insights performance management tool that was unveiled at the conference.

LXF: You know what NOSQL and Cassandra are good at. What’s the one thing it isn’t good at? Mani Srinivasan: Jonathan alluded to it this morning: ease of use and configuration.

LXF: But that problem you’ve solved. What’s something that you haven’t? MS: Well, what we’d like to do is make the lives of the operators a lot simpler than what it is today. So we throw a bunch of metrics, we throw a bunch of things and let people interpret whatever they would want to do. What we’d like to do is to solve that problem altogether by removing the operational layer completely and solving the operational complexities of managing Cassandra. Because even managing Cassandra is pretty difficult, as a matter of fact. You can throw a bunch of dashboards, you can throw a bunch of metrics, but after that… Especially for customers that come from a relational background, it is very difficult to transition to this kind of a world. What Datastax is trying to do is to solve this problem. I would say that’s one thing.

JE: If you wanted to look at it from a different axis, I’d say that Cassandra is not a data warehouse… It’s not going to suck all your data in from all parts of the company and run your analysis against that. We are focused on being the operational data layer. And that does include some analytical features but that’s intended to enable the operational parts, rather than being a pure-play analytics offering.

LXF: In that regard, do you tell people it’s a database or a database management system?

JE: I’ve always told people that it’s a database. I think we are heading closer to the direction of the database management system with the stuff that we announced today. But the distinction, where you cross the line from one to the other, is a bit fuzzy.