MongoDB vs. Cassandra vs. MySQL for real-time advertising platform

Question

I'm working on a real-time advertising platform with a heavy emphasis on performance. I've always developed with MySQL, but I'm open to trying something new like MongoDB or Cassandra if significant speed gains can be achieved. I've been reading about both all day, but since both are being rapidly developed, a lot of the information appears somewhat dated.

The main data stored would be entries for each click, incremented rows for views, and information for each campaign (just some basic settings, etc). The speed gains need to be found in inserting clicks, updating view totals, and generating real-time statistic reports. The platform is developed with PHP.

Or maybe none of these?

Answer 1

NoSQL solutions are better than Mysql, Postgresql and other RDBMS techs for this task. Don't waste your time with Hbase/Hadoop, you've to be an astronaut to use it. I recommend MongoDB and Cassandra. Mongo is better for small datasets if your data is maximum 10 times bigger than your ram, otherwise, you have to shard, need more machines and use replica sets. For big data; Cassandra is the best. Mongodb has more query options and other functionalities than Cassandra but you need 64-bit machines for mongo. There are some works around for analytics on both sides. There are atomic counters on both sides. Both can scale well but Cassandra is much better in scaling and high availability. Both have PHP clients, both have good support and community mongo community is bigger.