2012 in review: Performance

The text discusses a comparison of distributed databases, specifically focusing on Cassandra's performance advantages over other NoSQL systems like MongoDB, Riak, and HBase. It highlights Cassandra's adoption of several architectural best practices that contribute to its superior scalability and throughput. These include being fully distributed with every machine handling a proportionate share of system activities, using a log-structured storage engine for efficient I/O operations on both hard disks (HDD) and solid-state drives (SSD), and having tight integration with its storage engine to support advanced concurrent structures and row-level isolation without locking. The text also mentions the importance of implementation details in performance optimization, such as Cassandra's ability to append updated data without rewriting or re-reading existing data, which ensures that updates to a Cassandra row or partition remain fast as the dataset grows.