Cassandra is one of the most successful and widely used enterprise NoSQL systems. It incorporates both columnar and key-value concepts and stores data in row-based partitions. Each partition is in turn a primary key. Rows can have multiple columns and the number of columns may differ from one row to another.

Cassandra databases can be queries done via CQL, which uses a SQL-like syntax and makes the process of data querying, saving, and other common tasks much easier. Cassandra also uses a decentralized architecture; it does not have any single point of failure and supports multi-node architecture.

In addition to the standard horizontal scalability of Cassandra DBMS, the platform also supports Elastic scalability and is able to transparently allocate and de-allocate nodes depending upon needs. On the whole, Cassandra is one of the most formidable options for enterprise NoSQL systems and is used in production environment across multiple large firms globally.

Business use case: Cassandra is a fully open source solution and implements multiple key features of NoSQL systems. It is used in production workloads globally and has matured into a stable, enterprise-grade, open source platform. In other words, Cassandra is well suited for managing large organizational needs and does not incur any additional licensing costs. A commercial, licensed, and paid version of Cassandra is also available from Datastax: https://www.datastax.com/products/datastax-enterprise. It is known as DSE (Datastax Enterprise). DSE incorporates various enterprise features such as security and search, and can also be accessed via the Datastax Managed Cloud environment using popular cloud providers such as AWS.