Apache Cassandra Changelog #1 (October 2020)

Posted on October 28, 2020 by the Apache Cassandra Community« Back to the Apache Cassandra BlogIntroducing the first Cassandra Changelog blog! Our monthly roundup of key activities and knowledge to keep the community informed.Release NotesThe most current Apache Cassandra releases are 4.0-beta2, 3.11.8, 3.0.22, 2.2.18 and 2.1.22 released on August 31 and are in the repositories. The next cut of releases will be out soon―join the Cassandra mailing list to stay up-to-date.We continue to make progress toward the 4.0 GA release with the overarching goal of it being at a state where major users should feel confident running it in production when it is cut. Over 1,300 Jira tickets have been closed and less than 100 remain as of this post. To gain this confidence, there are various ongoing testing efforts involving correctness, performance, and ease of use.AddedWith CASSANDRA-15013, the community improved Cassandra's ability to handle high throughput workloads, while having enough safeguards in place to protect itself from potentially going out of memory.AddedThe Harry project is a fuzz testing tool that aims to generate reproducible workloads that are as close to real-life as possible, while being able to efficiently verify the cluster state against the model without pausing the workload itself.AddedThe community published its first Apache Cassandra Usage Report 2020 detailing findings from a comprehensive global survey of 901 practitioners on Cassandra usage to provide a baseline understanding of who, how, and why organizations use Cassandra.Updates on new and active Cassandra Enhancement Proposals (CEPs) and how to contribute.ChangedCEP-2: Kubernetes Operator was introduced this year and is an active discussion on creation of a community-based operator with the goal of making it easy to run Cassandra on Kubernetes.AddedCEP-7: Storage Attached Index (SAI) is a new secondary index for Cassandra that builds on the advancements made with SASI. It is intended to replace the existing built-in secondary index implementations.AddedCassandra was selected by the ASF Diversity & Inclusion committee to be included in a research project to evaluate and understand the current state of diversity.User SpaceBigmate"In vetting MySQL, MongoDB, and other potential databases for IoT scale, we found they couldn't match the scalability we could get with open source Apache Cassandra. Cassandra's built-for-scale architecture enables us to handle millions of operations or concurrent users each second with ease – making it ideal for IoT deployments." - Brett OrrBloomberg"Our group is working on a multi-year build, creating a new Index Construction Platform to handle the daily production of the Bloomberg Barclays fixed income indices. This involves building and productionizing an Apache Solr-backed search platform to handle thousands of searches per minute, an Apache Cassandra back-end database to store millions of data points per day, and a distributed computational engine to handle millions of computations daily." - Noel GunasekarIn the NewsSolutions Review - The Five Best Apache Cassandra Books on Our Reading ListZDNet - What Cassandra users think of their NoSQL DBMSDatanami - Cassandra Adoption Correlates with ExperienceContainer Journal - 5 to 1: An Overview of Apache Cassandra Kubernetes OperatorsDatanami - Cassandra Gets Monitoring, Performance UpgradesZDNet - Faster than ever, Apache Cassandra 4.0 beta is on its wayCassandra Tutorials & MoreA Cassandra user was in search of a tool to perform schema DDL upgrades. Another user suggested https://github.com/patka/cassandra-migration to ensure you don't get schema mismatches if running multiple upgrade statements in one migration. See the full email on the user mailing list for other recommended tools.Start using virtual tables in Apache Cassandra 4.0 - Ben Bromhead, InstaclustrBenchmarking Apache Cassandra with Rust - Piotr Kołaczkowski, DataStaxOpen Source BI Tools and Cassandra - Arpan Patel, Anant CorporationBuild Fault Tolerant Applications With Cassandra API for Azure Cosmos DB - Abhishek Gupta, MicrosoftUnderstanding Data Modifications in Cassandra - Sameer Shukla, RedgateCassandra Changelog is curated by the community. Please send submissions to cassandra@constantia.io.