Cassandra moves up to rank #7 in the DB-Engines Ranking, overtaking Microsoft Access. Part of its success lies in the fact that it is different.

To many database enthusiasts, becoming more popular than Microsoft Access might not sound like a good enough reason to crack open the Champaign at the Datastax headquarter in Santa Clara. However that may be, becoming the 7th most popular database management system in that crowded space of 300+ systems certainly is. An impressive achievement for a DBMS that’s only 8 years old.

Cassandra is one of three NoSQL systems in the top 10 of our ranking. MongoDB and Redis are the other ones. However, although we conveniently keep putting these systems into the “NoSQL bucket”, Cassandra feels quite different when you start working with it.

Every developer is familiar with nested structures, therefore moving from an RDBMS to a Document Store such as MongoDB feels very natural. Actually, data modeling for a Document Store is in many ways easier than for an RDBMS, even though we have learned in the last 30 years how to squeeze every piece of information into a fixed data scheme, so we can do that now while we are sleeping.

Getting started with a Key-value Store such as Redis is even easier and takes literally only a few lines of code. You may or may not come to the more advanced features offered by Redis later, when you need them. That’s all not a big deal, from a conceptual point of view.

Cassandra is different.

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http://db-engines.com/en/blog_post/59