Apache Cassandra™ is a distributed NoSQL database that delivers continuous availability, high performance, and linear scalability that successful applications require.
Apache Cassandra is an open source, distributed NoSQL database that began internally at Facebook and was released as an open-source project in July 2008. Cassandra delivers continuous availability (zero downtime), high performance, and linear scalability that modern applications require, while also offering operational simplicity and effortless replication across data centers and geographies. Cassandra can handle petabytes of information and thousands of concurrent operations per second, enabling organizations to manage large amounts of data across hybrid cloud and multi cloud environments.
At DataStax, we’re working hard with the open-source community to build on Cassandra’s decade-plus of maturity to solidify its position as the leading database for cloud-native applications.
Apache Cassandra was developed by Avinash Lakshman and Prashant Malik when both were working as engineers at Facebook. The database was designed to power Facebook’s inbox search feature, making it easy for users to quickly find the conversations and other content they were looking for. The architecture combined the distribution model proposed in Amazon’s Dynamo paper to allow horizontal scaling across multiple nodes with the log-structured storage engine described in Google’s BigTable paper. The result was a highly scalable database that could address the most data-rich and performance-intensive use cases.
In July 2008, Facebook open-sourced Cassandra. In March 2009, Cassandra became an Apache Incubator project. In April 2010, it graduated from the incubator, becoming a top-level project for the Apache Foundation. Today, Cassandra is freely available under the Apache License 2.0. The team at DataStax were leaders in evolution of the open-source database, responsible for the majority of the project’s code commits through the 3.0 release, and we have rededicated ourselves as active collaborators for the project’s future, assisting with the 4.0 release and beyond.
Whether you need to process server logs, emails, social media posts, or PDFs, Cassandra’s got you covered. As a result, you’ll be able to make better-informed decisions without leaving any of your data on the table. Beyond that, Cassandra delivers a slew of other benefits.
Here are a few of the ideas we’re exploring:
Cassandra has traditionally been known as an extremely powerful database that stands up to the most demanding use cases, but also one that is difficult to learn and operate. DataStax is committed to working with the Cassandra community to make Cassandra easier to use, adopt, and extend for your needs.
If you are looking to learn more about Apache Cassandra, we’ve got plenty of resources here to help you get started.
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