by Angela Guess
Alan Shimel of Network World reports that Apache’s Cassandra has released version 1.1 of the NoSQL database. Shimel notes that the new release “has significant new features among which are improved caching, a revised query language and better Hadoop integration. I had a chance to chat with Jonathon Ellis, the project chair for Apache Cassandra, as well as co-founder and CTO at DataStax, the company that offers commercial support and commercial versions of Cassandra. Jonathon was originally at Rackspace and led a lot of the heavy lifting as Cassandra was first accepted to the Apache Incubator and then spun off as an Apache project in its own right. He is very excited about the 1.1 release because to him it represents a real maturing of the product. That is not insignificant when much of the competition can measure their existence in months and not years.”
Shimel continues, “One of the things Ellis was most excited by was the integrated caching now available in the Cassandra. While many use the open source Memcached, Ellis said that by integrating Cassandra’s own native caching it has really improved performance. Also it makes it easier to develop in Cassandra. Another big improvement in this version is the update to CQL (Cassandra Query Language). The CQL was originally developed by the Rackspace folks and added in to Cassandra .8. I believe the new version is CQL version 3. CQL is similar to SQL and eases the migration path for database developers moving over from the SQL world.”
photo credit: Cassandra
