Highly-performant, Open Source Big Data distributed database in use at Adobe, CERN, Comcast, eBay, GoDaddy, HP, IBM, Instagram, Netflix, Plaxo, and Sony, among others, to create modern, data-driven applications

Forest Hill, MD –4 September
2013– The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers,
stewards, and incubators of nearly 150 Open Source projects and initiatives,
today announced Apache Cassandra v2.0, the latest version of the
highly-scalable, Big Data distributed database.

Apache Cassandra powers massive data sets quickly and
reliably without compromising performance, whether running in the Cloud or
partially on-premise in a hybrid data store. Its fully distributed architecture
provides unparalleled fault tolerance to ensure applications will not go
offline, and its linear scalability allows them to reach massive sizes while successfully
handling thousands of requests per second.

"In five years, Apache Cassandra has grown into one of the
most widely used NoSQL databases in the world and serves as the backbone for
some of today’s most popular applications," said Jonathan Ellis, Vice President
of Apache Cassandra.

Under the Hood

New features in Apache Cassandra v2.0 include lightweight
transactions, triggers, and CQL (Cassandra Query Language) enhancements that
increase productivity in creating modern, data-driven applications.

"Cassandra 2.0 makes it easier than ever for developers to
migrate from relational databases and become productive quickly," added Ellis.

New features and improvements include:

  • Lightweight transactions allow ensuring operation linearizability
    similar to the serializable isolation level offered by relational databases,
    which prevents conflicts during concurrent requests
  • Triggers, which enable pushing performance-critical code close to the
    data it deals with, and simplify integration with event-driven frameworks like
    Storm
  • CQL
    enhancements such as cursors and improved index support
  • Improved
    compaction, keeping read performance from deteriorating under heavy write load
  • Eager
    retries to avoid query timeouts by sending redundant requests to other replicas
    if too much time elapses on the original request
  • Custom
    Thrift server implementation based on LMAX Disruptor that achieves lower
    message processing latencies and better throughput with flexible buffer
    allocation strategies

Strong Community
Engagement and Adoption

The Apache Cassandra developer community includes some of
the brightest minds in Big Data. Hundreds of organizations, from startups to
large-scale enterprises such as Adobe, Cisco and IBM, rely on Cassandra to
power their mission-critical applications online.

"At Ooyala, we're building some of our most ambitious
projects to date on top of Apache Cassandra," said Al Tobey, Tech Lead, Compute
and Data Services, Ooyala. "The maturation of CQL3, vnodes, and new features
such as the PAXOS-backed compare-and-set (CAS) added in Cassandra 2.0 will help
us build and deploy those projects confidently."

Apache Cassandra is used by many highly-visible organizations such as Accenture, CERN, Cloudkick, Comcast, Constant Contact, Dell, Digg, Ericsson, Eventbrite, GoDaddy, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, HP, Instagram, Intuit, Mahalo, Microsoft MetricsHub, Morningstar, NASA, Netflix, Nextag, OpenWave, PBS Kids, Pitney Bowes, Plaxo, Polyvore, Real Networks, Reddit, Sony Network Entertainment, SoundCloud, Spotify, Squidoo, Stormpath, Symantec, Twitter, Wildfire, WSO2, and ZoomInfo. A listing of where Apache Cassandra is used and deployment details can be found at http://planetcassandra.org/Company/ViewCompany?IndustryId=-1

"We are excited about the future Apache Cassandra 2.0 makes possible. Paying down a lot of the technical debt accumulated over 5 years of intense Open Source development, and solidifying the Native Binary Transport for CQL 3, has put the project on a great footing," said Aaron Morton, Apache Cassandra committer and Co-Founder & Principal Consultant of The Last Pickle. "The addition of Lightweight 'Compare-and-Set' Transactions and Cursors brings another set of features that make it easier for developers to harness the performance and scale of Cassandra. And the experimental Trigger support will allow Open Source contributors to provide feedback for this often requested feature."

"It'll be really helpful to have conditional updates built into Cassandra," explained Jon Haddad, Senior Architect at Shift. "Right now there's a few places where we have to use external locking to manage isolation, and having built in support in the database will be amazing."

"We feel this release will delight existing users and tempt those on the sidelines," added Morton.

Availability and
Oversight
As with all Apache products, Apache Cassandra v2.0 is released under the
Apache License v2.0, and is overseen by a self-selected team of active
contributors to the project. A Project Management Committee (PMC) guides the
Project's day-to-day operations, including community development and product
releases. Apache Cassandra source code, documentation, and related resources
are available at http://cassandra.apache.org/.

About The Apache
Software Foundation (ASF)
Established in 1999, the all-volunteer Foundation oversees nearly one
hundred fifty leading Open Source projects, including Apache HTTP Server --the
world's most popular Web server software. Through the ASF's meritocratic
process known as "The Apache Way," more than 400 individual Members
and 3,500 Committers successfully collaborate to develop freely available
enterprise-grade software, benefiting millions of users worldwide: thousands of
software solutions are distributed under the Apache License; and the community
actively participates in ASF mailing lists, mentoring initiatives, and
ApacheCon, the Foundation's official user conference, trainings, and expo. The
ASF is a US 501(c)(3) charitable organization, funded by individual donations
and corporate sponsors including AMD, Basis Technology, Budget Direct, Citrix,
Cloudera, Comcast, Facebook, Go Daddy, Google, HP, Hortonworks, Huawei, IBM,
InMotion Hosting, Matt Mullenweg, Microsoft, PSW Group, Pivotal, WANdisco, and
Yahoo!. For more information, visit http://www.apache.org/ or follow @TheASF on
Twitter.

"Apache", "Cassandra", "Apache
Cassandra", and "ApacheCon" are trademarks of The Apache
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Contact:
Sally Khudairi
Vice President
The Apache Software Foundation
pressATapacheDOTorg
+1 617 921 8656