Developing applications with Apache Cassandra™ and DataStax Enterprise

The DataStax drivers are the primary resource for application developers creating solutions using 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 DataStax Enterprise, 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.

Programming language options

There are DataStax drivers for a range of programming languages. The drivers have features common across all the drivers. Please consult the individual driver documentation pages for detailed information on the driver’s features and API.

Table 1. Development status of DataStax drivers
Actively developed drivers	Maintenance mode drivers ^[1]
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

DataStax drivers

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

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.

Table 2. Driver upgrade guides
C/C++	C#	Java	Node.js	Python

DataStax driver functionality

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

DSE workloads

DataStax Enterprise 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 particular language. Visit the DataStax Downloads for direct links to download locations and the DataStax Documentation for installation information.

Table 3. 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

Footnotes

1. Supported by DataStax, but only critical bug fixes will be included in new versions.