[web007]

This description is very misleading.

120,000 writes per second is accurate, talking about actual durable storage (disk) writes. But it's only 3,330 transactions, which should be the number that a user cares about.

I don't have proper data and I'm a bit rusty, but I feel like Cassandra could blow that away if you set similar consistency requirements on the client side (QUORUM on read, same for write?). Am I understanding this correctly, or does Fauna/Calvin give you something functionally better than what C* can do?

[freels]

A more apples-to-apples comparison with Cassandra would be FaunaDB transactions and Cassandra's atomic batch mutations, or its PAXOS-based lightweight transactions as opposed to single-cell writes tested in most Cassandra benchmarks.

YMMV, but we've found the performance of Cassandra writing out similar-sized multi-row atomic batches at QUORUM to be similar in this hardware configuration.

FaunaDB transactions are quite a bit more powerful, as they can span multiple keys, use conditionals and read-modify-write logic, and still resolve with serializable semantics.

[web007]

That makes a lot more sense then. It's still a misleading statement to say "writes" vs "transactions" since you could (potentially) make fewer writes and support more transactions. The ratio between the two is a measure of efficiency, but only transactions matter to end-users.

[evanweaver]

You're right that one number trades off another. I'm not sure that only transactions matters, though.

Tracking logical writes makes the test comparable to tests of key-value stores that can only update one key at time, which is pretty much every other distributed database.