Welcome to Apache Cassandra

The Apache Cassandra Project develops a highly scalable second-generation distributed database, bringing together Dynamo's fully distributed design and Bigtable's ColumnFamily-based data model.

Cassandra was open sourced by Facebook in 2008, where it was designed by one of the authors of Dynamo. In a lot of ways you can think of Cassandra as Dynamo 2.0. Cassandra is in production use at Rackspace, Digg, and a number of other companies, but is still under heavy development.

Features

  • Highly Availabile

    Writes never fail. Two different read paths are available: high-performance "weak" reads and quorum reads. See ThriftInterface.

  • Decentralized

    Every node in the cluster is identical. There are no network bottlenecks. There are no single points of failure.

  • Consistent, Eventually

    Cassandra follows the "eventually consistent" model but includes sophisticated features such as Hinted Handoff and Read Repair to minimize inconsistency windows.

  • Fault Tolerant

    Data is automatically replicated to multiple nodes for fault-tolerance. There is support for implementing strategies that replicate across multiple data centers.

  • Rich Data Model

    Allowing efficient use for many applications beyond simple key/value.

  • Atomic

    Cassandra guarantees reads and writes to be atomic within a single ColumnFamily.

  • Elastic

    Storage and throughput increase linearly as new nodes are added. If you need more capacity, simply add more nodes.

Learn More

Mailing Lists

Chat

Many of the Cassandra developers and community members hang out in the #cassandra channel on irc.freenode.net.

If you are new to IRC and don't have a client, you can use a web-based client.