Apache Cassandra on Windows? Absolutely!

Outside of politics and religion, nothing can get the blood rolling in tech folk’s bodies more than a healthy debate on the merits of operating systems, such as Linux vs. Windows vs. Mac. Personally, I’ve never used Mac in a production environment, but I have plenty of experience with databases on Linux and Windows. And I have a confession to make: I’ve always found Windows to be a pleasant experience.

I’ve worked with Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL, and PostgreSQL on Windows and in general was happy with the results. I remember a case at a large company I worked where we benchmarked Oracle for a major trading system on a large HPUX system against a Windows config that cost 75% less and saw the Windows box win in 90% of the test cases.

my experience, I also never saw all the supposed outages, performance issues, etc., that some report on Windows. That doesn’t mean my experience of managing databases on Windows was perfect, but overall, Windows did a very nice job for the systems I was assigned to care for.

few months back we ran a poll asking what development platforms you used, and you said you used Microsoft Windows a lot (it was second on the list behind Mac). So we’ve listened to you and now made available a bundled installer for Windows that includes the latest version of Apache Cassandra, all utilities including the CQL interface, and our DataStax OpsCenter community edition. The MSI installer does everything for you, including creating all the Windows services you need, and takes about one minute to complete.

For a run-through of what the new Windows package looks like along with some pointers on getting started on Windows, see a new article I’ve posted here on using our new installer on a single Windows box. The installer is primarily designed for single Windows installs on workstations and laptops, but you can create multi-node setups with a little manual tweaking – something I demonstrate in this article that shows how to create and monitor a new Cassandra cluster on Windows.

Today, we support Windows 7 and Windows 2008 Server, both 32 and 64-bit, for development work only. Production support will be coming soon. Download our new Windows package and let us know what you think. And thanks for continuing to support Apache Cassandra and DataStax!