Cassandra 5 Released! What's New and How to Try It

• Mon, Sep 9, 2024
• 3-minute read

Apache Cassandra 5.0 has officially landed! This highly anticipated release brings a range of new features and performance improvements to one of the most popular NoSQL databases in the world. Having recently hosted a webinar covering the major features of Cassandra 5.0, I’m excited to give a brief overview of the key updates and show you how to easily get hands-on with the latest release using easy-cass-lab.

You can grab the latest release on the Cassandra download page.

What’s New in Cassandra 5.0?

Cassandra 5.0 introduces several exciting features that enhance both functionality and performance:

• BTI Storage Format with Trie Indexes: An improved storage format that improves read and write performance through more efficient indexing.
• Data Masking: Built-in support for protecting sensitive data, allowing you to mask data at the database level.
• New Guardrails: Enhanced safety measures that help prevent misconfigurations or risky operations in production environments.
• More CQL Functions: An expanded set of CQL functions, offering more flexibility for developers.
• Storage-Attached Indexing (SAI): A powerful new indexing feature that provides more data modeling options and flexibility for querying large datasets.
• Trie Memtables: Trie-based memtables that improve memory efficiency and reduce the overhead of data storage operations.
• Unified Compaction Strategy (UCS): A new compaction strategy that simplifies the management of storage and improves compaction efficiency.
• Vector Search: Support for vector search, enabling advanced search capabilities like similarity search for RAG based AI applications.

These updates make Cassandra 5.0 a powerhouse for modern, data-intensive applications.

How to Try Cassandra 5.0 with easy-cass-lab

To help you explore Cassandra 5.0, I’ve updated easy-cass-lab, a tool that simplifies setting up and managing local Cassandra clusters. If you already have easy-cass-lab installed, here’s how you can spin up a Cassandra 5.0 environment in just a handful of steps:

mkdir five_oh && cd five_oh
easy-cass-lab init -c 3 -s 1 five_oh --up
easy-cass-lab use 5.0
easy-cass-lab start

This is a great way to get started with Cassandra 5.0 and experiment with its new features in a local environment.

Conclusion

Cassandra 5.0 is a huge leap forward for the Cassandra community, offering powerful new tools for handling large datasets, enhanced security, and better performance. Whether you’re already using Cassandra or are looking to explore NoSQL solutions for the first time, this release is worth checking out.

Go ahead, spin up a cluster using easy-cass-lab, and start experimenting with all the new features! If you have any questions, feel free to drop a comment below or watch the webinar for a more in-depth look at the latest enhancements.

I plan on releasing more posts covering the new features in additional detail. The best way to stay updated is to join my mailing list.