We're using Cassandra at scale (~1M concurrent users at peak). It is, in our experience, an absolutely terrible piece of software.
The development community doesn't seem to care about fixing bugs, and when they do fix things, they reliably introduce new, often devastating defects. "Move fast and break things" is unforgivable at the persistence layer. We're stuck using an ancient, unsupported version, because it is, per our empirical testing, the least bad. But we made that choice, and for now we're stuck with it.
Please, let our pain be a lesson to you. I am totally willing to be someone else's "That's how you get ants..." on this point. Our emoji for it in Slack is a burning poo. It's that bad.
I am not a DBA, obviously. I did have to work as one, but that was a lot of years ago. So, pardon me if this is a dumb question.
You say you're stuck with it. Can't you just change a few things, shut down for a little while, export your data, and insert it into a new DB? I know it is hard to do it with writes happening at the same time, but it seems like you could freeze it as read only, extract the data, and put it into a DB that has been prepped ahead of time and tested.
I know we did this more than once BUT it wasn't with public facing data and we were able to migrate while still working on existing data. We just couldn't add more data while doing so.
>We're stuck using an ancient, unsupported version, because it is, per our empirical testing, the least bad. But we made that choice, and for now we're stuck with it.
Which is this least bad version, if you don't mind my asking?
The development community doesn't seem to care about fixing bugs, and when they do fix things, they reliably introduce new, often devastating defects. "Move fast and break things" is unforgivable at the persistence layer. We're stuck using an ancient, unsupported version, because it is, per our empirical testing, the least bad. But we made that choice, and for now we're stuck with it.
Please, let our pain be a lesson to you. I am totally willing to be someone else's "That's how you get ants..." on this point. Our emoji for it in Slack is a burning poo. It's that bad.
EDIT: phrasing.