Apache Cassandra 1.1 release comes to pass

The Apache Software Foundation has announced the availability of version 1.1 of Apache Cassandra, the open source, highly scalable, column-oriented, distributed "NoSQL" database. The new release features improvements to its caching, Hadoop integration, storage control, data directory control and scalability.

CQL, the Cassandra Query Language, has also been revised and renumbered as version 3.0, with an evolved schema model, the ability to create tables with multi-column primary keys and other changes. Users have also welcomed features such as row-level isolation and composite keys in Cassandra 1.1: "The focus has clearly shifted to usability which is the sign of a solid system. I look forward to getting it into production right away," said Patrick McFadin, Chief Architect of Hobsons.

Cassandra is a distributed database management system that was originally developed by Facebook; it was open sourced in July 2008 to become the basis of a project in the Apache Foundation's Incubator. In late February 2010, it was accepted as an Apache Top-Level Project (TLP). It is used by companies such as Digg, Twitter, Rackspace, Cisco, Netflix and Reddit. It brings together the fully distributed design of Amazon's large-scale Dynamo key-value store and the ColumnFamily-based data model of Google's BigTable. According to the ASF, the largest known production cluster of Cassandra carried over 300 terabytes of data spread over 400 machines.

Cassandra 1.1 is released under the Apache Licence 2.0 and source and binary releases are available to download from the project's pages on Apache.org.

(djwm)