Version 2.0 of the Apache Cassandra database has just been released. The Apache Software Foundation are leading on the addition of lightweight transations and triggers to the database. Cassandra originated at Facebook who donated it to Apache in 2008. It is designed to work with massive data sets and mixes Google’s Big Table data model with Facebook’s own distributed architecture Dynamo.
Datastax, who produce a commercial version of Cassandra, have the detailed blog entries on lightweight transactions which can ensure an update is committed to all replicas through a prepare/promise/propose/accept process, on triggers which can start processing tasks as changes in tables are detected and on the enhancements made to CQL, Cassandra’s SQLish query language. There’s also a roundup of all the other changes in Cassandra 2.0, such as the requirement to use Java 7, varios spring cleaning and performance optimisations. The Datastax documentation has also been updated for 2.0 and is also available as a PDF.
Usually with Apache project releases (and other events), the decision to release and the actual release can be a matter of some weeks, but this time round it was less than a week between those two events. Could this be a sign that the ASF will synchronise their announcements more with events than an artificially paced schedule? We shall see.
This article was imported from the original CodeScaling blog