Apache Launches Updated Open Source Database

Darryl K. Taft,

The next generation Cassandra open-source database has been announced by The Apache Software Foundation

The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) has announced its second-generation, open-source distributed database, known as Apache Cassandra version 0.7.

ASF officials said new features in Cassandra 0.7 include secondary indexes, which represent an expressive way to query data through node-local storage on the client side; large row support, up to two billion columns per row; and online schema changes, or automated online schema changes from the client API to allow adding and modifying object definitions without requiring a cluster restart.

ASF also said Apache Cassandra has been successfully deployed at enterprises with active data sets and large server clusters, including Cisco, Cloudkick, Digg, Facebook, Rackspace, Reddit and Twitter. The largest Cassandra cluster to date contains over 400 machines.

Ideal For Cloud

“Apache Cassandra is a key component in cloud computing and other applications that deal with massive amounts of data and high query volumes,” said Jonathan Ellis, vice president of Apache Cassandra, in a statement. “It is particularly successful in powering large web sites with sharp growth rates.”

“Running any large website is a constant race between scaling your user base and scaling your infrastructure to support it,” said David King, lead developer at Reddit, in a statement. “Our traffic more than tripled this year, and the transparent scalability afforded to us by Apache Cassandra is in large part what allowed us to do it on our limited resources. Cassandra v0.7 represents the real-life operations lessons learned from installations like ours and provides further features like column expiration that allow us to scale even more of our infrastructure.”

Apache Cassandra is available under the Apache Software License v2.0, and is overseen by a Project Management Committee (PMC), who guides its day-to-day operations, including community development and product releases.

Moreover, Apache Cassandra v0.7 downloads, documentation, and related resources are available at http://cassandra.apache.org/.