The Apache Software Foundation Announces Apache Cassandra Release 0.6

Newest version of leading Open Source, NoSQL distributed database management system now available.

FOREST HILL, Md., April 13 /PRNewswire/ -- The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) -- developers, stewards, and incubators of 138 Open Source projects -- today announced Apache Cassandra version 0.6, the Project's latest release first since its graduation from the ASF Incubator in February 2010.

Apache Cassandra is an advanced, second-generation "NoSQL" distributed data store that has a shared-nothing architecture. The Cassandra decentralized model provides massive scalability, and is highly available with no single point of failure even under the worst scenarios.

"In response to the growing need for scalable, high-throughput databases, we are pleased to release Cassandra 0.6," said Jonathan Ellis, Apache Cassandra Project Management Committee Chair. "It's fantastic seeing the Project's community at the ASF grow to match the promise of the technology."

Originally developed at Facebook and submitted to the ASF Incubator in 2009, the Project has added more than a half-dozen new committers, and is deployed by dozens of high-profile users such as Cisco WebEx, Cloudkick, Digg, Facebook, Rackspace, Reddit, and Twitter, among others.

"The services we provide to customers are only as good the systems they are built on," said Eric Evans, Apache Cassandra committer and Systems Architect at The Rackspace Cloud. "With Cassandra, we get the fault-tolerance and availability our customers demand, and the scalability we need to make things work."

Cassandra 0.6 features include:

- Support for Apache Hadoop: this allows running analytics queries with the leading map/reduce framework against data in Cassandra.

"Digg is very excited to see Cassandra mature in the last year and graduate to a top-level Apache project. Cassandra is powering our next generation infrastructure, and allowing us to run in an environment that demands data access in datacenters around the world," said Chris Goffinet, Performance and Availability Architect at social news website Digg.

- Integrated row cache: this eliminates the need for a separate caching layer, thereby simplifying architectures.

Powering more than 10 billion pages, Twitter switched to Apache Cassandra because it can run on large server clusters and is capable of taking in very large amounts of data at a time. Storage Team Technical Lead Ryan King explained, "At Twitter, we're deploying Cassandra to tackle scalability, flexibility and operability issues in a way that's more highly available and cost effective than our current systems."

- Increased speed: this builds on Cassandra's highly-lauded ability to process thousands of writes per second, allowing solutions of all kinds to cope with increasing write loads.

"Apache Cassandra 0.6 is 30% faster across the board, building on our already-impressive speed," added Ellis. "It achieves scale-out without making the kind of design compromises that result in operations teams getting paged at 2 AM."

Availability

Released under the Apache Software License v2.0, Apache Cassandra 0.6 can be downloaded at http://cassandra.apache.org/.

About The Apache Software Foundation (ASF)

Established in 1999, the all-volunteer Foundation oversees more than seventy leading Open Source projects, including Apache HTTP Server — the world's most popular Web server software. Through The ASF's meritocratic process known as "The Apache Way," nearly 300 individual Members and 2,000 Committers successfully collaborate to develop freely available enterprise-grade software, benefiting millions of users worldwide: thousands of software solutions are distributed under the Apache License; and the community actively participates in ASF mailing lists, mentoring initiatives, and ApacheCon, the Foundation's official user conference, trainings, and expo. The ASF is funded by individual donations and corporate sponsors including Facebook, Google, HP, Microsoft, Progress Software, SpringSource/VMware, and Yahoo! For more information, visit http://www.apache.org/.

SOURCE Apache Software Foundation