The Apache Cassandra Project is launching v4.0 of Apache Cassandra, offering more than 1,000 bug fixes, improvements and new features.
"A long time coming, Cassandra 4.0 is the most thoroughly tested Cassandra yet," said Nate McCall, vice president of Apache Cassandra. "The latest version is faster, more scalable, and bolstered with enterprise security features, ready-for-production with unprecedented scale in the cloud."
As a NoSQL database, Apache Cassandra handles massive amounts of data across load-intensive applications with high availability and no single point of failure.
Cassandra v4.0 effortlessly handles unstructured data, with thousands of writes per second, according to the vendor. Other new features include:
- Increased speed and scalability – streams data up to 5 times faster during scaling operations, and up to 25% faster throughput on reads and writes, that delivers a more elastic architecture, particularly in Cloud and Kubernetes deployments.
- Improved consistency – keeps data replicas in sync to optimize incremental repair for faster, more efficient operation and consistency across data replicas.
- Enhanced security and observability – audit logging tracks users access and activity with minimal impact to workload performance. New capture and replay enables analysis of production workloads to help ensure regulatory and security compliance with SOX, PCI, GDPR, or other requirements.
- New configuration settings – exposed system metrics and configuration settings provides flexibility for operators to ensure they have easy access to data that optimize deployments.
- Minimized latency – garbage collector pause times are reduced to a few milliseconds with no latency degradation as heap sizes increase.
- Better compression – improved compression efficiency eases unnecessary strain on disk space and improves read performance.
Cassandra 4.0 is community-hardened and tested by Amazon, Apple, DataStax, Instaclustr, iland, Netflix, and others that routinely run clusters as large as 1,000 nodes and with hundreds of real-world use cases and schemas.
The Apache Cassandra community deployed several testing and quality assurance (QA) projects and methodologies to deploy the most stable release yet.
During the testing and QA period, the community generated reproducible workloads that are as close to real-life as possible, while effectively verifying the cluster state against the model without pausing the workload itself.
In addition to Cassandra 4.0, the Project also announced a shift to a yearly release cycle, with releases to be supported for a three-year term.
For more information about this news, visit https://cassandra.apache.org.