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Apache Cassandra 5.0 Features: Mathematical CQL Functions

February 5, 2024

Apache Cassandra excels in scalable data handling with powerful CQL math functions. From basic arithmetic to advanced stats, it enables efficient, real-time processing and supports diverse domains, enhancing overall application performance.

Cassandra Contributor November Meeting Replay

January 2, 2024

November’s meeting discussed the upcoming Apache Cassandra 5.0 release.

Town Hall Replay: mondayDB Architecture - Crafting a Database From Scratch

January 2, 2024

Learn how monday.com built their custom database, mondayDB, from scratch using Apache Cassandra.

Town Hall Replay: Josh McKenzie - State of the Cassandra Community

January 2, 2024

Josh reviews Apache Cassandra’s growth, contributors, and the challenge of consensus for long-term project health.

Welcoming the Inaugural Cassandra Catalysts

December 15, 2023

At Cassandra Summit 2023, the inaugural batch of Cassandra Catalysts was announced.

Town Hall Replay: Cassandra at Walmart

December 8, 2023

Explore how Walmart optimized data management with Apache Cassandra, streamlining processes and upgrading to version 4, and its impact on operations in this Town Hall recap.

December 5, 2023

Explore the key Vector Search benefits Apache Cassandra users can look forward to, as well as applications the capability can enable.

Introducing the Apache Cassandra® Catalyst Program

December 1, 2023

Announcing the brand new Apache Cassandra® Catalyst Program, the first of it’s kind!

Apache Cassandra 5.0 Features: Storage Attached Indexes

November 14, 2023

Storage Attached Indexes offers enhanced data retrieval with new indexes, minimizing storage, and boosting query speed for efficient, high-performance applications.

Apache Cassandra 5.0 Features: Trie Memtables and Trie-Indexed SSTables

November 9, 2023

Trie Memtables & Trie-Indexed SSTables improve data handling, boost performance, reduce write amplification, and aid scalability.

Cassandra Contributor October Meeting Replay

October 30, 2023

Get an update on the status of CEP-29 in this recap of the October contributor meeting.

Apache Cassandra 5.0 Features: Unified Compaction Strategy

October 27, 2023

Unified Compaction Strategy optimizes Apache Cassandra data compaction, adapting to diverse workloads for improved performance.

Apache Cassandra 5.0 Features: Dynamic Data Masking

October 11, 2023

Apache Cassandra 5.0 adds Dynamic Data Masking for secure data retrieval via masking functions and permissions.

Town Hall Replay: Cassandra 5.0 Features We’re Excited About

Spetember 30, 2023

Learn how to handle one of the biggest Cassandra challenges of all: efficiently storing and retrieving over a petabyte of time series data accumulated over several years..

Cassandra Contributor July Meeting Replay

July 30, 2023

Get an update on the status of CEP-7 in this recap of the July contributor meeting.

Cassandra Contributor August Meeting Replay

August 31, 2023

Get an update on the status of CEP-19 in this recap of the July contributor meeting.

Town Hall Replay: Time Series Data Modeling for Massive Scale

August 23, 2023

Learn tricks to maximize Cassandra’s scalability. Discover efficient storage and retrieval of petabytes of time series data, plus tips to avoid common pitfalls.

Town Hall Replay: Bad Partition Handling & Large Language Models

August 16, 2023

Learn how to handle and mitigate bad partitions during production incidents and explore the impact of LLMs.

Town Hall Replay: Monitoring Apache Cassandra Without Implementation

August 2, 2023

The second Apache Cassandra Town Hall covers monitoring Cassandra using eBPF without implementing changes in code and reading and writing Cassandra data with Spark Bulk Analytics using CEP-28.

Town Hall Replay: Cassandra Performance Tuning Like You’ve Been Doing it For Ten Years

July 27, 2023

Learn about Cassandra performance tuning in this recap of the inaugural Apache Cassandra Town Hall.

Apache Cassandra 3.0 and 3.11 EOL at 5.0 Release

May 15, 2023

Announcing the end of life (EOL) for Apache Cassandra versions 3.0 and 3.11.

Announcing Monthly Town Halls

April 19, 2023

Join us for the kickoff of our new monthly live, virtual Town Hall meetings.

2023 Google Season of Documentation Proposal

February 27, 2023

We have applied to the GSoD with this proposal!

Apache Cassandra Summit Agenda Announced

January 18, 2023

Register today to join us in San Jose, California for the Cassandra Summit on March 13 & 14!

Apache Cassandra 4.1 is here!

December 13, 2022

Apache Cassandra 4.1 is GA! Read the blog for more details on the key features you won’t want to miss in the next major release from the project.

Cassandra Summit 2023 registration is now open

November 30, 2022

Registrations for Cassandra Summit 2023 are open. Book your place for this not to be missed two-day event in San Jose, California.

Apache Cassandra wins BigDATAwire Open Source Projects to Watch Award

November 29, 2022

Apache Cassandra wins the BigDATAwire Open Source Projects to Watch Award for its exciting new features due in the next and future releases.

Apache Cassandra Changelog #20

November 3, 2022

We announce Cassandra 4.1-beta1 and a host of city-based Cassandra Days from Santa Clara to Hanoi, Jakarta and Singapore.

Cassandra Days Asia | Vietnam-Indonesia-Singapore

October 26, 2022

Join us as we take Cassandra Days to Asia — Hanoi (Nov 8), Jakarta (Nov 10) and Singapore (Nov 15).

Cassandra Day + Wakanda Forever

October 22, 2022

Join us for an action-packed Cassandra Day in Santa Clara, Bellevue & Houston with talks, workshop and a private screening of Wakanda Forever!

Cassandra Summit Returns in 2023

September 29, 2022

It’s time for the Apache Cassandra community to gather again! Learn more about Cassandra Summit 2023.

Cassandra Days for London and Amsterdam announced

September 29, 2022

Join us in London and Amsterdam for more Cassandra Days packed with talks and workshops and a chance to socialize with users, enthusiasts, and community members.

Apache Cassandra Changelog #19

September 27, 2022

Cassandra 4.0.6 is released and Cassandra Day in Berlin announced. Two new episodes of Apache Cassandra Corner podcast released and work resumes on JDK17 support.

Learn How CommitLog Works in Apache Cassandra

September 26, 2022

Learn how Apache Cassandra’s CommittLog works, how Cassandra ensures data durability, and how various tuning parameters affect its behavior.

Apache Cassandra Changelog #18

August 19, 2022

Cassandra 4.0.5 is released, we say thank you to everyone for their help on Cassandra World Party and to Nate McCall, who is stepping down as PMC Chair.

Cassandra Day in Berlin Announced

August 12, 2022

Join us in Berlin for a Cassandra Day packed with talks and workshops and a chance to socialize with users, enthusiasts, and community members.

Watch the Cassandra World Party

August 4, 2022

Don’t worry if you missed this year’s Cassandra World Party, we have the livestreams for every session and the individual talks for you to enjoy!

Apache Cassandra 4.1 Features: Pluggable Memtable Implementations

July 21, 2022

Apache Cassandra 4.1 supports alternative memtable implementations. Learn more about this feature and the proof of concept implementation included in the new release.

Last Chance to Register: Schedule & Moderators Announced

July 15, 2022

Register now for the upcoming Cassandra World Party and learn more about the speakers and moderators participating.

Apache Cassandra Changelog #17

July 12, 2022

Cassandra 4.1 is getting closer, new Cassandra podcast and Cassandra World Party speakers and sponsors announced!

Apache Cassandra 4.1: Configuration Standardization

July 7, 2022

Introducting the New configuration framework for standardized property names and units, and provide more flexibility to end users.

Apache Cassandra 4.1: Denylisting Partitions

June 30, 2022

Operators gain control of problematic partitions with Apache Cassandra’s new feature in 4.1, the Partition Denylist.

Talks & Sponsors Announced for Cassandra World Party 2022

June 29, 2022

Cassandra World Party 2022 draws closer, we announce some of the talks and sponsors for the event.

Apache Cassandra 4.1 Features: Authentication Plugin Support for CQLSH

June 23, 2022

As the new version nears completion, we highlight how Apache Cassandra 4.1 will introduce support for authentication plugins for CQL shell (CQLSH).

Apache Cassandra 4.1: New SSTable Identifiers

June 16, 2022

Apache Cassandra 4.1 includes many features that make life easier for operators. One of them is a new globally unique identifier for SSTables.

Apache Cassandra World Party 2022

June 9, 2022

In anticipation of the release of Cassandra 4.1, we’re excited to announce the second-annual Cassandra World Party, a fun-packed event running across three time zones.

Apache Cassandra Changelog #16

June 2, 2022

Cassandra 4.1-alpha available, new patch releases, and Cassandra World Party announced!

Apache Cassandra 4.1 Features: Client-side Password Hashing

May 26, 2022

To strengthen security and avoid the use of plain-text credentials altogether, Apache Cassandra has added the option to use client-side password hashes in 4.1.

The Path to Green CI

May 19, 2022

As we approach the GA of Cassandra 4.1, we reflect on our development journey and show some statistics to demonstrate the level of testing that now goes into the project.

Apache Cassandra 4.1 Features: Guardrails Framework

May 12, 2022

Cassandra 4.1 introduces Guardrails - a framework that helps enforce good practices to avoid poor cluster performance and availability because of certain user actions.

Apache Cassandra Changelog #15

May 5, 2022

Code freeze in readiness for Cassandra 4.1 release, volunteers needed for Build Lead role, and CFPs open for Cassandra and Performance Engineering tracks at ApacheCon NA.

Liquibase is Ready to Support Cassandra 4.0 Users

April 28, 2022

Read the case study on Liquibase, which is both the name for an open source project for database change management and a company offering a paid-for version, and supports Apache Cassandra 3.11 and 4.0.

Inside Cassandra: An Interview with Project Contributor, Aleksandr Sorokoumov

April 21, 2022

We continue our Inside Cassandra series with a Q&A with Aleksandr Sorokoumov who recently accepted the committer position in recognition of his contributions.

ApacheCon NA 2022 Call For Papers Open

April 7, 2022

Here is a great opportunity to contribute to the project. ApacheCon NA 2022 Call For Papers is open!

Apache Cassandra Changelog #14

April 7, 2022

Cassandra’s GitHub PRs get a clean-up, a new committer is announced, more volunteers are needed for Build Lead, and Python vs. in-jvm dtest is discussed.

Kinetic Data chooses Apache Cassandra to deliver workflow automation solution

March 31, 2022

Read our latest user case study. When it came to building a new platform, Kinetic Data chose Apache Cassandra as the database for building its workflow automation solution.

Inside Cassandra: An Interview with Project Contributor, Lorina Poland

March 17, 2022

We continue our Inside Cassandra series by introducing the people behind the Apache Cassandra. Our first interviewee is Lorina Poland, who recently accepted the committer position in recognition of all her work on project documentation.

Can Apache Cassandra take my PEM keys?

March 10, 2022

Maulin Vasavada demonstrates how to use PEM-based security credentials like your private key, corresponding certificate chain, and trusted CA certificates. These credentials will have built-in support in Apache Cassandra 4.1 which will also introduce a pluggable configuration for customizing the SSL context for TLS encryption

Join Apache Cassandra’s Google Summer of Code Program 2022

March 8, 2022

Apache Cassandra will be participating in the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) in 2022 again after a successful project in 2021, and the program itself this year has some changes we are excited to announce.

Apache Cassandra Changelog #13

March 3, 2022

A new patch is released for all supported versions to address a known vulnerability, we celebrate three new committers, and see SAI and other CEP features approved.

Java SE 11 LTS and Apache Cassandra

February 24, 2022

With the release of version 4.0.2, Cassandra’s support for Java 11 will no longer be experimental and offers a number of features including better performance because of better garbage collection.

Apache Cassandra Upgrade Advisory

February 18, 2022

If the operator has configured the cluster in a documented insecure way, it is possible for malicious users to execute remote code using scripted UDFs. Users of Apache Cassandra 3.0, 3.11, and 4.0 to upgrade or to reset enable_user_defined_functions_threads back to true.

Behind the scenes of an Apache Cassandra Release

February 18, 2022

Formalizing how we balance the need to evolve and provide cutting-edge features with long-term stability. The simple rules we use to decide when to merge and why we’ll be supporting three GA releases going forward, but why we’ve decided to support four releases for the next cycle.

Tightening Security for Apache Cassandra: Part 3

February 14, 2022

In Part 3 of Maulin Vasavada’s mini-series on improving security, we detail how Cassandra 4.0 delivers ways to customize mTLS/TLS configuration while retaining the hot-reload functionality.

Apache Cassandra Changelog #12

February 10, 2022

A new Build Lead role is announced. Ideas are requested for Google Summer of Code, and the Future of UDF is defined. Cassandra’s CI process is formalized and a Trie Memtable Implementation is discussed.

Tightening Security for Apache Cassandra: Part 2

February 7, 2022

Part 2 of Maulin Vasavada’s mini-series covers how to secure data in transit using TLS/mTLS, configure TLS/mTLS properly, and the challenges before the release of Apache Cassandra 4.0.

Tightening Security for Apache Cassandra: Part 1

January 31, 2022

The growth in ecommerce has demanded a greater focus on data security, Maulin Vasavada begins a mini-series on how to customize SSL/TLS configurations to tighten security in Cassandra 4.0+.

Apache Cassandra Changelog #11

January 18, 2022

We deck the halls with Jira tickets running an Advent Calendar during December. Many CEPs have been approved and are in development while others, such as CEP-3 and CEP-10, have already been merged. We also welcome Sumanth Pasupuleti who becomes a committer and we start warming up for Google Summer of Code.

Configurable Storage Ports and Why We Need Them

January 14, 2022

Cassandra’s network configuration is highly adaptable, communicating across a great variety of networks and devices, we explain how and why you might need to change your storage port configuration.

Using Arithmetic Operators in Cassandra 4.0

December 21, 2021

With the release of Cassandra 4.0, CQL now supports arithmetic operators. Benjamin Lerer describes how to use operators, and how we’ve addressed challenges around return types and types inference.

Harry, an Open Source Fuzz Testing and Verification Tool for Apache Cassandra

November 18, 2021

Introducing Harry, an Open Source fuzz testing and verification tool for Apache Cassandra that can combine properties of stress- and integration-testing tools. Harry can generate data for an arbitrary schema, execute data modification queries against the cluster, track the progress of operation execution, and make sure that responses to read queries are correct.

Inside Cassandra: an interview with Marcel Birkner at Instana

November 17, 2021

We interview Marcel Birkner, Site Reliability Engineer at Instana, how they use Apache Cassandra to store and process the metric data at scale and benefit from Cassandra’s fault tolerance, and have learned the importance of dog-fooding.

What the Future Holds for Apache Cassandra

October 26, 2021

The release of Apache Cassandra 4.0 has opened the floodgates to new feature proposals. Many feature ideas have been approved and are in development such as a cluster and code action simulator and support for general-purpose transaction support while others, such as Storage Attached Indexing, are being discussed.

Apache Cassandra Changelog #10

October 5, 2021

Apache Cassandra 4.0.1 is released, and Aleksei Zotov becomes a committer. Discussions are underway for some key, new feature proposals, including support for general-purpose transactions and Storage Attached Index (SAI). CEP-11, the pluggable memtable implementations proposal, has been approved, as has CEP-13 for a denylisting partitions feature.l-making.

Reaper: Anti-entropy Repair Made Easy

September 28, 2021

Originally designed by Spotify, Reaper is an open source written in Java to schedule and orchestrate repairs of Apache Cassandra clusters. It helps make repairs as safe and reliable as possible, and with the recent release of Apache Cassandra 4.0 that also includes incremental repairs.

Join Cassandra at Apachecon 2021

September 20, 2021

Register to attend ApacheCon 2021 for a packed series of presentations on the new features in development for Apache Cassandra, along with best practices for CI & testing, and cutting-edge use cases. The BoF event at the end of the day includes a deep dive into Apache Cassandra 4.0 and cocktail-making.

Cassandra on Kubernetes: A Beginner’s Guide

September 4, 2021

Managing infrastructure has been standardizing around Kubernetes. Learn how the Apache Cassandra community has been developing solutions to simplify deployment and management of data with Cassandra operators and open source distributions for Kubernetes.

Apache Cassandra Upgrade Advisory

August 18, 2021

Users of Apache Cassandra 3.023, 3.0.24, 3.11.9 and 3.11.10 should upgrade due to the potential for data corruption during schema changes.

Apache Cassandra Changelog #9

August 18, 2021

Release of 4.0 GA, 3.0.25, and 3.0.11, upgrade advisory and Jon Meredith becomes committer.

Apache Cassandra 4.0 Overview

August 18, 2021

Take a look at the full overview of the latest and greatest features of Apache Cassandra 4.0.

Apache Cassandra 4.0 is Here

July 27, 2021

On November 9th, 2015 the Apache Cassandra project released version 3.0 and, with it, a host of really big changes you would expect in a major version.

Apache Cassandra Changelog #8

June 28, 2021

4.0-rc2 released, say hello to our Google Summer of Code intern and new community intro to Cassandra videos.

Cassandra and Kubernetes: SIG Update #2

June 9, 2021

The Cassandra Kubernetes SIG is excited to share that there has been coalescence around the Cass Operator project as the community-based operator.

Apache Cassandra Changelog #7

May 31, 2021

Our monthly roundup of key activities and knowledge to keep the community informed.

Speakers Announce for April 28 Cassandra 4.0 World party

April 19,2021

The list of speakers for Apache Cassandra’s upcoming 4.0 World Party.

Apache Cassandra Changelog #6

April 12,2021

Our monthly roundup of key activities and knowledge to keep the community informed.

Apache Cassandra World Party 2021

March 25, 2021

We are now one of the most important databases today and manage the biggest workloads in the world. Because of that, we want to gather the worldwide community to

Join Apache Cassandra for Google Summer of Code 2021

March 10, 2021

The ASF has been a GSoC mentor organization since the beginning. Apache Cassandra mentored a successful GSoC project in 2016 and we are participating again this year.

Apache Cassandra Changelog #5

March 08, 2021

Our monthly roundup of key activities and knowledge to keep the community informed.

Apache Cassandra Changelog #4

February 11, 2021

Our monthly roundup of key activities and knowledge to keep the community informed.

Apache Cassandra Changelog #3

January 19, 2021

Our monthly roundup of key activities and knowledge to keep the community informed.

Apache Cassandra Changelog #2

December 01, 2020

Our monthly roundup of key activities and knowledge to keep the community informed.

Apache Cassandra Changelog #1

October 28, 2020

Introducing the first Cassandra Changelog blog! Our monthly roundup of key activities and knowledge to keep the community informed.

Apache Cassandra Usage Report 2020

September 17, 2020

Apache Cassandra is the open source NoSQL database for mission critical data. Today the community announced findings from a comprehensive global survey of 901 practitioners on Cassandra usage. It’s the first of what will become an annual survey that provides a baseline understanding of who, how, and why organizations use Cassandra.

Improving Apache Cassandra’s Front Door and Backpressure

September 03, 2020

As part of CASSANDRA-15013, we have improved Cassandra’s ability to handle high throughput workloads, while having enough safeguards in place to protect itself from potentially going out of memory. In order to better explain the change we have made, let us understand at a high level, on how an incoming request is processed by Cassandra before the fix, followed by what we changed, and the new relevant configuration knobs available.

Cassandra and Kubernetes: SIG Update and Survey

August 14, 2020

Five operators for Apache Cassandra have been created that have made it easier to run containerized Cassandra on Kubernetes. Recently the major contributors to these operators came together to discuss the creation of a community-based operator with the intent of making one that makes it easy to run C* on K8s. One of the project’s organizational goals is that the end result will eventually become part of the Apache Software Foundation or the Apache Cassandra project.

Introducing Apache Cassandra 4.0 Beta: Battle Tested From Day One

July 20, 2020

This is the most stable Apache Cassandra in history; you should start using Apache Cassandra 4.0 Beta today in your test and QA environments, head to the downloads site to get your hands on it. The Cassandra community is on a mission to deliver a 4.0 GA release that is ready to be deployed to production. You can guarantee this holds true by running your application workloads against the Beta release and contributing to the community’s validation effort to get Cassandra 4.0 to GA.

Even Higher Availability with 5x Faster Streaming in Cassandra 4.0

April 09, 2019

Streaming is a process where nodes of a cluster exchange data in the form of SSTables. Streaming can kick in during many situations such as bootstrap, repair, rebuild, range movement, cluster expansion, etc. In this post, we discuss the massive performance improvements made to the streaming process in Apache Cassandra 4.0.

Introducing Transient Replication

December 03, 2018

Transient Replication is a new experimental feature soon to be available in 4.0. When enabled, it allows for the creation of keyspaces where replication factor can be specified as a number of copies (full replicas) and temporary copies (transient replicas). Transient replicas retain the data they replicate only long enough for it to be propagated to full replicas, via incremental repair, at which point the data is deleted. Writing to transient replicas can be avoided almost entirely if monotonic reads are not required because it is possible to achieve a quorum of acknowledged writes without them.

Audit Logging in Apache Cassandra 4.0

October 29, 2018

Database audit logging is an industry standard tool for enterprises to capture critical data change events including what data changed and who triggered the event. These captured records can then be reviewed later to ensure compliance with regulatory, security and operational policies.

Finding Bugs in Cassandra’s Internals with Property-based Testing

October 17, 2018

As of September 1st, the Apache Cassandra community has shifted the focus of Cassandra 4.0 development from new feature work to testing, validation, and hardening, with the goal of releasing a stable 4.0 that every Cassandra user, from small deployments to large corporations, can deploy with confidence. There are several projects and methodologies that the community is undertaking to this end. One of these is the adoption of property-based testing, which was previously introduced here. This post will take a look at a specific use of this approach and how it found a bug in a new feature meant to ensure data integrity between the client and Cassandra.

Testing Apache Cassandra 4.0

August 21, 2018

With the goal of ensuring reliability and stability in Apache Cassandra 4.0, the project’s committers have voted to freeze new features on September 1 to concentrate on testing and validation before cutting a stable beta. Towards that goal, the community is investing in methodologies that can be performed at scale to exercise edge cases in the largest Cassandra clusters. The result, we hope, is to make Apache Cassandra 4.0 the best-tested and most reliable major release right out of the gate.

Hardware-bound Zero Copy Streaming in Apache Cassandra 4.0

August 07, 2018

Streaming in Apache Cassandra powers host replacement, range movements, and cluster expansions. Streaming plays a crucial role in the cluster and as such its performance is key to not only the speed of the operations its used in but the cluster’s health generally. In Apache Cassandra 4.0, we have introduced an improved streaming implementation that reduces GC pressure and increases throughput several folds and are now limited, in some cases, only by the disk / network IO (See: CASSANDRA-14556).