[serialpreneur]

I think you can sum up some of the grievances of the OP as "felt mislead by Cassandra/DataStax marketing". But, some of the criticism is not really the fault of Cassandra or DataStax at all IMO.

- CQL stands for Cassandra Query Language. As a user of C*, I don't remember anywhere in docs it claiming it conforming to the SQL standard. They do mention it to be "similar to SQL" which is a fair comparison.

As a counter-example of another somewhat similar database, AWS DynamoDB. The absence of a CQL like syntax really frustrates me.

- Data Modelling: Effective data modelling is difficult in all DB systems, inherently more so in NOSQL or non-ACID distributed DBs.

- Counters & Collections: I feel that criticism is legit. I felt similar pains too. I've learned the lesson there not to trust all marketing claims.