Version 4.1 of Apache Cassandra, the open source NoSQL distributed database, has been released. The team says this release paves the way to a more cloud-native future for the project by externalizing important key functions, extending Apache Cassandra, and enabling an expanded ecosystem without compromising the stable core code.

Apache Cassandra handles massive amounts of data across load-intensive applications with high availability and no single point of failure.

High-profile users include Apple, which has over 160,000 instances storing over 100 petabytes of data across 1,000+ clusters, Huawei and Netflix, where Cassandra handles over 1 trillion requests per day.

Cassandra's plugability has been a focus in this release, and the team says that as frameworks are added, they are establishing a straightforward interface to Cassandra internals and an understood contract when using outside code. Work has also been done on features to provide better control, improved ease of use, and flexibility.

Cassandra's Paxos consensus protocol is another area to have received attention. Cassandra uses a Paxos consensus protocol implementation for consistency using quorum reads to ensure a single value is selected and executed from all the proposed updates at any given time. The work this time has been on Lightweight Transactions, which are used where an action needs to persist based on the current state of the system, such as selling tickets for seats. In the past, Lightweight Transactions have suffered from poor performance, so the developers have worked to optimize Paxos to improve the performance of these transactions by 50%, improving latency, and halving the number of required round-trip to achieve consensus.

There are also a number of new Cassandra Query Language features, including the ability to group by time range and to use Contains and Contains Key conditions in conditional updates.

There's also new support for Exists in Alter statements, and Group By can now to use to output row sets that are the same into a single grouped row. Support has also been added for pre-hashed passwords in CQL.

Cassandra 4.1 is available now.

More Information

Cassandra Website

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