DataStax C# Driver 3.0 Released

We've just released version 3.0.0 of the DataStax C# Driver with support for Apache Cassandra 3.0.

The main focus for this release was to add support for the changes in the schema metadata introduced in Cassandra 3.0 that is used internally by the driver, while maintaining compatibility with earlier versions of Cassandra. Additionally, we added Materialized Views metadata information and introduced a new Index metadata API.

The release also includes the following noteworthy improvements.

Performance Improvements

We are focused on delivering a great performance under the .NET runtime. On the past months we implemented a series of improvements that allowed us to deliver significantly higher throughput rates compared to v2.7 of the driver:

Message coalescing, making less syscalls in high concurrent scenarios.
Buffer pooling
Reduce allocations for VOID results
Avoid ConcurrentDictionary.Count calls

Linq / Mapper: Inserting Entities with Null Property Values

We added an option to the Mapper and Linq components to avoid to INSERT null values, to allow you to avoid unnecessary tombstones.

mapper.Insert(new User { FirstName = "Jimi", LastName = "Hendrix" }, insertNulls: false);

Default Setting Changes

We've taken the opportunity of a major version release to revamp the default settings to the recommended values.

Looking Forward

Up until now, in the C# driver we were using version numbers to denote compatibility with Apache Cassandra. This is a good way to avoid doubts about which driver versions supported Cassandra versions but it constrained us to deliver major/breaking changes to the driver API independently from Cassandra.

For future versions, we decided to move to pure semantic versioning.

As you may already know, when adding support for newer Cassandra / DSE versions in the C# driver, compatibility with earlier Cassandra versions were always maintained. This will continue to be the case.

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