I recently attended a talk by a sales engineer for Acunu (http://www.acunu.com/), an analytics platform for Cassandra. I came away with a couple interesting notes:
– The product aims to build data cubes for you in a “big data” scenario
– Operating on the principle that disk space is cheap, they increment lots of counters on insert
– These counters correspond to specific cube + filter + grouping scenarios
– It sounds like treating cells in a database as counters is a Cassandra feature (I think I’d heard similar about Redis)
– They can also do “normal” count queries – if you had 20 dimensions, you’d be forced to build 20! cubes otherwise
– Like all cubes, this can still cause issues with double-counting (if you added two cubes) so it’s not really preferable if you work with “small” data
– Their UI has some out of the box charting capacity (with High Charts)
– Pricing is based on usage (i.e. rather than cores)
– This is possibly a competitor to MetaMarkets Druid (http://metamarkets.com/product/technology/), which I covered previously
What would be interesting here, for further research, is to compare the performance of NoSql counters and see if similar functionality can be had with a relational database.