DataStax adds real-time data streaming to managed AstraDB service

DataStax is adding low-latency change data capture (CDC) capabilities to its AstraDB NoSQL database-as-a-service.

Built on the open source Apache Pulsar project, DataStax is looking to help customers build low-latency data streaming capabilities into their applications. Originally built at Yahoo, Pulsar has emerged as an open source event streaming tool to rival Apache Kafka, which processes and delivers database changes in real-time and distributes the results to your choice of landing zone.

“You can stream the changes of voluminous data coming into your database to other destinations such as Snowflake, BigQuery, C++, Java or any other programmatic client,” said Chris Latimer, vice president of product management at DataStax.

The big promise here is for customers to be able to more easily blend operational and streaming data in one managed environment.

“What looks to be unique is that DataStax is offering a CDC feature for a non-relational database, while most CDC options are for relational databases. CDC is usually a feature of either the [database management systems], or a system designed for close change data detection,” said Carl Olofson, research vice president at IDC.

There is currently a healthy debate across the industry that Apache Pulsar, which is a server-to-server messaging service, is better than its more established rival Apache Kafka, due to its cloud-native design and suitability for more distributed applications.