It’s time to start kicking Cassandra’s tires.
The first (and obvious) place to download it is from the Apache Cassandra project download page. So I went there and got the latest stable release of Cassandra (1.0.6, released on 2011-12-14).
I also went out looking for commercially supported versions of Cassandra and after a quick Google, found a product offered by DataStax called DataStax Enterprise. I got the tar ball version for their latest release (dse-1.0-3-bin.tar.gz)
I installed both versions on our SUSE Linux Dev. Server.
To cut a long story short: The Apache Cassandra version unpackaged, installed and started up cleanly in minutes. The DataStax Enterprise Edition did not.
Here are the steps I followed:
1) With the Apache Version
# tar -xzvf apache-cassandra-1.0.6-bin.tar.gz
# cd apache-cassandra-1.0.6
# bin/cassandra –f
<Cassandra starts up cleanly with a long console output that looks reasonably happy and ends with
INFO 22:56:38,688 Listening for thrift clients...>
2) Now the Datastax Version
#tar -xzvf dse-1.0-3-bin.tar.gz
#cd dse-1.0-3
# bin/dse cassandra -f
< Cassandra tries to start but crashes with an error -
Error occurred during initialization of VM
Could not reserve enough space for object heap
Could not create the Java virtual machine.>
Oh Brother – the ol’ Java Heap again.
Doesn’t my server have enough memory ? Well - It does . ~ 8 GB actually
Just to double check, I moved over to our mighty Cloud Test Server(hosted on Amazon EC2) also running SUSE Linux. and many of our powerful enterprise Java apps (for example, ESB's like Apache Servicemix, ActiveMQ, etc).
Repeated the same install steps.
Same results – Cassandra from Apache starts up clean and nice. The DataStax version crashes.
OK - I can feel a rant coming on - about Commercial Open Source – but let me hold that off till the next post -:)
