Developing applications with Apache Cassandra® and DataStax Enterprise (DSE)

The DataStax drivers are the primary resource for application developers creating solutions using Apache Cassandra® or DataStax Enterprise (DSE).

This guide covers general features and access patterns common across all DataStax drivers, with links to the individual driver documentation for details on using the driver features. If you are developing applications using data stored in Cassandra or DSE, familiarize yourself with these techniques and features to make sure your application is performant and scalable.

Prerequisites

Before building an application, learn about the DSE architecture and review the DataStax Academy tutorials. It’s especially important to understand data modeling when developing applications using Cassandra or DSE. This foundation helps ensure your application performs to its fullest potential.

DataStax driver programming languages

As of January 2020, DataStax no longer develops separate drivers for Cassandra and DataStax Enterprise (DSE). All driver functionality that was formerly in the DSE-only drivers are now in the DataStax drivers. Going forward, all new driver features will be implemented in the DataStax drivers.

Maintenance mode drivers are supported by DataStax but only receive critical bug fixes in new versions.

Drivers supported by DataStax
Actively developed drivers	Maintenance mode drivers
C/C++ driver	PHP driver
C# driver \| C# DSE Graph Extension	Ruby driver
Java driver (DSE Graph Extension included)
Node.js driver \| Node.js DSE Graph Extension
Python driver \| Python Graph Extension

If you currently use one of the DSE drivers, see the upgrade guide in the individual driver’s documentation for details on how to migrate to the unified DataStax driver.

Driver upgrade guides
C/C++	C#	Java	Node.js	Python

DataStax driver features

CQL support
Synchronous/Asynchronous API
Address translation
Load balancing policies
Retry policies
Reconnection policies
Connection pooling
Automatic cluster discovery
SSL
Error Handling
Compression
Query builder
Object mapper
DSE Graph Fluent API
DSE Advanced Security, Unified Authentication
DSE Geometric types

DataStax Enterprise (DSE) workloads

DSE supports several workload types:

Transactional (Cassandra-only)
Search
Analytics
Graph

The DataStax drivers support most of these workloads natively, simplifying applications that run Transactional, Search, and Graph queries alongside one another.

The DataStax drivers in this guide do not support DSE Analytics queries. The access patterns in analytics use cases are different than the access patterns used by the other workloads. The ODBC and JDBC drivers for DSE Analytics and the DSE Spark Cassandra Connector are typically used with the DSE drivers for analytics applications.

For more about workloads, see Working with multi-workload clusters.

Getting started

Each DataStax driver is hosted on the common distribution channel for the driver’s language. For download links, see DataStax Downloads.

For driver compatibility and links to language-specific driver documentation, see DataStax driver matrix.

Drivers for each language
C/C++	C#	Java	Node.js	PHP	Python	Ruby
Binaries hosted on datastax.com	NuGet	Maven	NPMJS	Binaries hosted on datastax.com	PyPI	RubyGems