Of course you can compare them. You can compare the speed of Oracle on a huge RAC cluster vs. text files on an Amiga 500 floppy drive. But no one would, because it's stupid and worthless. I guess that's what I meant: this is a stupid and worthless article.
I didn't mean to claim anyone will be struggling to decide between VoltDB and Cassandra and then choose VoltDB based on the benchmarks we did. I think that's as ridiculous as you do.
Our point, which perhaps I made poorly, was twofold.
1. You can be both fast and SQL. Nothing about the language itself was ever the bottleneck.
2. VoltDB isn't just for big complicated transactions. You can use SQL for KV-type workloads and perform.
There's 100 other reasons to pick one data layer over another, and the best tool will be different for different problems.
