Version 0.8.0 of the open source NoSQL database has been released. This version debuts the Cassandra Query Language (CQL) and has distributed counters.

A new version of Cassandra has been released. The NoSQL database was originally developed by the team at Facebook, and was made open source in 2008 after which it became an Apache Foundation Incubator project. Web services such as Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and Digg use Cassandra. According to the announcement of the official release of Cassandra 0.8.0 on its mailing list:  

“this is the release that debuts the Cassandra Query Language (CQL). In one fell swoop Cassandra has become more than NoSQL, it's MoSQL.”

The new version also supports encryption for intranode traffic and has distributed counters.

CQL will look very familiar to anyone who knows SQL, with most of the usual keywords - Select, Use, Update, Drop and Create are all there and work pretty much as you expect.

There’s no Insert command; instead, Update either updates the existing record or creates it if it doesn't exist.

CQL will move the work to the server side and drivers for it are available for Java, Python, and Twisted. You can read more about CQL in its documentation.

One main advantage offered by Cassandra is its fault tolerance; data is automatically replicated to multiple nodes and replication across multiple data centers is supported. Every node in a Cassandra cluster is identical, and you can choose between synchronous or asynchronous replication for each update.

The largest Cassandra production cluster has over 100 TB of data in over 150 machines.

The latest version can be downloaded here: http://cassandra.apache.org/download/