• Apache Cassandra
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What’s new in Cassandra 2.0 (Part 3)

Our final blog post on looking at what’s new in Cassandra 2.0.

CQL

CQL has seen some general updates such as alias support in SELECT statements (e.g. SELECT foo as bar… ), automatic paging of results through the native protocol and support SASL authentication framework. Support for SASL will make plugging in different authentication schemes such as Kerberos much easier.

The rest

The Cassandra code base has also been cleaned up with problematic or unused features being stripped out. The biggest change is a rewrite of super columns, which are now implemented internally using composite column names (which perform better).

The on heap row cache has been removed as it caused more problems than it was worth, the off heap cache still exists. Expect the row cache to be reworked/rewritten/improved or something in the future.

On top of that a few other bits and pieces have been reworked, plus the standard collection of fixes and patches you expect to see in any release.

Final thoughts

So all in all, this is shaping up to be a great release with some much requested features. Obviously there will be a few bugs that have slipped through, but they will be fixed pretty quickly based on how awesome the Cassandra community is. So thanks to everyone who worked on it and for those interested, get stuck into it!