SAN MATEO, CA -- (Marketwire) -- 01/10/13 -- DataStax, the company that powers the apps that transform business, today announced DataStax Community Edition 1.2, the latest version of Apache Cassandra™, the massively scalable open-source NoSQL database. The new release comes with a free edition of DataStax OpsCenter, the #1 visual management and monitoring solution in use today for Cassandra, which enables developers to manage and monitor their Cassandra clusters in point-and-click fashion from any location and from nearly any device.

DataStax Community Edition 1.2 contains all of Apache Cassandra 1.2's features including:

• Virtual nodes, which improve the granularity of capacity increases, dramatically improve repair and rebuild times in larger clusters, and automatically keep the data in clusters balanced across all nodes
  
  
• CQL3 improvements, notably the addition of collection types, query-able system information, and a CQL-native protocol
  
  
• Request tracing allows developers and administrators to trace CQL requests on an individual or collective basis and easily understand what statements in a cluster are causing performance problems
  
  
• Atomic batches ensure multiple statements sent to a cluster in batch are always applied in an all-or-nothing basis
  
  
• Configurable policies for disk failure
  
  

DataStax Community Edition 1.2 also features many performance improvements to memory usage, column indexes, compaction, streaming, startup time and more.

"Cassandra 1.2 represents one of the most significant releases of the database yet," said Jonathan Ellis, chief technology officer, DataStax, and project chair of Apache Cassandra. "This new release makes it much easier for developers to insert and manipulate data, while CQL3 in 1.2 allows them to model data more naturally. We also worked to improve Cassandra deployments on denser hardware, with features like virtual nodes (vnodes), disk failure policies and compaction performance."

In addition to vnodes, the new release features atomic batches, inter-node communication and request tracing. These enhancements simplify the process of setting up new clusters and enable a higher level of cluster performance. CQL3, the third version of the Cassandra Query Language, is also being released with Cassandra 1.2. Developers can enjoy simplified application modeling, more powerful mapping and a more natural representation of data that diminishes design limitations, augmenting Cassandra's renowned scalability and reliability.

"C* 1.2 is huge, but it's hard to really put a finger on an overall theme because the improvements are so wide ranging," said Rick Branson, software engineer, Instagram. "The solidification of CQL3 and addition of atomic batches make huge leaps forward in terms of developer productivity. On the operations side, the addition of vnodes and off-heap internals (compression metadata & bloom filters) make managing a cluster much simpler and more hands-off."

"There is something in Apache Cassandra 1.2 for everybody," said Aaron Morton, independent Apache Cassandra committer. "Virtual Nodes and CQL 3 will make it easier for new users to set up a cluster and get productive. Existing users will see their clusters doing more thanks to the performance improvements, while everyone will benefit from the insights that request tracing brings."

"Virtual nodes are the most exciting feature for us," said Christos Kalantzis, engineering manager of cloud persistence engineering, Netflix. "The fact that we can autoscale our Cassandra clusters up and down on EC2 has already made a huge impact on our productivity."

Starting January 11, 2013, users can download DataStax Community Edition 1.2 by visiting http://planetcassandra.org/Download/DataStaxCommunityEdition.

About DataStax

DataStax powers the apps that transform business for more than 200 customers, including startups and 20 of the Fortune 100. DataStax delivers a massively scalable, flexible and continuously available big data platform built on Apache Cassandra™. DataStax integrates enterprise-ready Cassandra, Apache Hadoop™ for analytics and Apache Solr™ for search across multi-datacenters and in the cloud.

Companies such as Adobe, Healthcare Anytime, eBay and Netflix rely on DataStax to transform their businesses. Based in San Mateo, Calif., DataStax is backed by industry-leading investors: Lightspeed Venture Partners, Crosslink Capital and Meritech Capital Partners. For more information, visit DataStax or follow us @DataStax.

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