Key features

Key improvements in Cassandra 1.2.

Cassandra 1.2 introduced many improvements, which are described briefly in this section.

• Cassandra 1.2.2 and later support CQL3-based implementations of IAuthenticator and IAuthorizer for use with these security features, which were introduced a little earlier:
  • Internal authentication based on Cassandra-controlled login accounts and passwords.
  • Object permission management using internal authorization to grant or revoke permissions for accessing Cassandra data through the familiar relational database GRANT/REVOKE paradigm.
  • Client-to-node-encryption that protects data in flight from client machines to a database cluster was also released in Cassandra 1.2.
• Virtual nodes

  Prior to this release, Cassandra assigned one token per node, and each node owned exactly one contiguous range within the cluster. Virtual nodes (vnodes) change this paradigm from one token and range per node to many tokens per node. This allows each node to own a large number of small ranges distributed throughout the ring, which has a number of important advantages.

• Murmur3Partitioner

  This new default partitioner provides faster hashing and improved performance.

• Faster startup times

  The release provides faster startup/bootup times for each node in a cluster, with internal tests performed at DataStax showing up to 80% less time needed to start primary indexes. The startup reductions were realized through more efficient sampling and loading of indexes into memory caches. The index load time is improved dramatically by eliminating the need to scan the partition index.

• Improved handling of disk failures

  In previous versions, a single unavailable disk had the potential to make the whole node unresponsive (while still technically alive and part of the cluster). Memtables were not flushed and the node eventually ran out of memory. If the disk contained the commitlog, data could no longer be appended to the commitlog. Thus, the recommended configuration was to deploy Cassandra on top of RAID 10, but this resulted in using 50% more disk space. New disk management solves these problems and eliminates the need for RAID as described in the hardware recommendations.

• Multiple independent leveled compactions

  Increases the performance of leveled compaction. Cassandra's leveled compaction strategy creates data files of a fixed, relatively small size that are grouped into levels.

• Configurable and more frequent tombstone eviction

  Tombstones are evicted more often and automatically in Cassandra 1.2 and are easier to manage. Configuring tombstone eviction instead of manually performing compaction can save users time, effort, and disk space.

• Support for concurrent schema changes

  Support for concurrent schema changes: Cassandra 1.1 introduced modifying schema objects in a concurrent fashion across a cluster, but did not support programmatically and concurrently creating and dropping tables (permanent or temporary). Version 1.2 includes this support, so multiple users can add/drop tables, including temporary tables, in this way.