Blogging Roller

Newer versions of Apache Cassandra include CQL, an SQL-like query language that supports both query, update and delete statements as well as the Data Definition Language (DDL) statements like create and alter for tables and indexes. You can create tables (known as column families in Cassandra lingo) just like you can in a relational database, but there are some caveats.

Great analysis, as usual, from Stephen O'Grady of Redmonk. Here's the part about Dynamo that concerns me, the lock-in:

Amazon DynamoDB: First Look: Like the initial wave of PaaS platforms, however, DynamoDB is available only through a single provider. Unlike Amazon’s RDS, which is essentially compatible with MySQL, DynamoDB users will be unable to migrate off of the service seamlessly. The featureset can be replicated using externally available code – via those projects that were originally inspired by DynamoDB, for example – but you cannot at this time download, install and run DynamoDB locally.