Performance tuning and benchmarks
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Apache HBase and Apache Cassandra are the two most widely deployed NoSQL databases in the Hadoop ecosystem. Both handle massive datasets across distributed clusters, but they have fundamentally different architectures that make each excel in different scenarios. This post cuts through the marketing and gives you a practical comparison.
Running SQL queries directly over petabytes of Hadoop data — without moving it into a separate warehouse — is one of the defining capabilities of a mature data platform. But the landscape of SQL-on-Hadoop engines is crowded and fragmented. Choosing the wrong one means slow analyst queries, wasted infrastructure spend, or painful migration later.
This guide reviews 10 SQL-on-Hadoop tools available in 2025, covering architecture, strengths, limitations, and the workloads each one is best suited for.