I am pleased to announce the release of Apache Cassandra 0.8.0 beta1. The 0.8 series is shaping up nicely and is packed with Awesome.
For example, wouldn't it be great if you could perform major upgrades without bringing the entire cluster to a complete stop? Well, starting with 0.8, backward compatible messaging means that rolling upgrades are now possible. Oh, and by "starting with 0.8" I mean, you'll be able to perform rolling upgrades from your 0.7 clusters. Ever wanted counters? Of course you have! How about encryption of inter-node data? Hell yes. Is it getting Real enough for you? No? Would you like a couple more rhetorical questions? Yes? How would you feel about a query language? Good, because now Cassandra is not only NoSQL, it's MoSQL. 0.8 is the debut of CQL (Cassandra Query Language), an SQL-alike query language. We already have language drivers for Java (JDBC), Twisted (txcql), Python (DBAPI2), and Node.js[6], and more are on the way! See the change log[1] and release notes[2] for a comprehensive list of what's new. One last thing. Also new for 0.8 are some changes to our release process. We've committed to maintaining compatibility between this beta and any subsequent beta or release candidates, and we're aiming for a final release in the second week of May (~3 weeks). This should make this phase easier and less drawn out for everyone, so please, download[4] the new beta and report any problems you find. Thanks! [1]: http://goo.gl/JdCiF (CHANGES.txt) [2]: http://goo.gl/a7tto (NEWS.txt) [3]: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA [4]: http://cassandra.apache.org/download [5]: http://wiki.apache.org/cassandra/DebianPackaging [6]: https://github.com/racker/node-cassandra-client -- Eric Evans eev...@rackspace.com