DataStax and the Cassandra Community

DataStax’s contributions to the Cassandra community cover a wide range of needs, all oriented towards your success in building Cassandra-based applications. I think of these as the “Three C’s of Community”: Code, Coaching, and Conferences.

Code

Cassandra

Obviously, DataStax continues to contribute to Apache Cassandra® itself.  Besides contributing the majority of the “tick-tock” releases culminating in the current 3.11, DataStax has contributed multiple features to the upcoming 4.0 release. These include:

• CQL support for selecting single keys and ranges of keys from Maps and Sets
• CQL support for arithmetic operators
• Virtual tables / system views, jointly developed with Apple. Follow-on tickets add views for active connections, in-progress compactions, configuration settings, and thread pools
• Thrift removal
• Java 11 Support

I’m happy to announce that as of today we are also releasing the DataStax Distribution of Apache Cassandra  as a new subscription offering to help fit the feature and price point that the community has asked us for.

Drivers

DataStax also maintains the most popular Cassandra drivers for seven languages. Collectively, these represent an estimated 36 engineer-years of effort. The Java driver alone includes over 300,000 lines of code added or modified in over 800 commits since Jan 2017. These drivers are completely open source with a liberal Apache license.

DataStax also recently updated its contributor license agreement (CLA) to align more closely with the Apache Software Foundation’s ICLA. Non-DataStax contributions make up close to 100 commits across all drivers for this time frame.

TinkerPop

Besides the tabular, document, and key-value models supported by Cassandra, DataStax Enterprise also provides a graph engine. DataStax contributes the majority of code to the graph framework Apache TinkerPop™, which provides standard, vendor-neutral ways of working with graph applications. TinkerPop is used by pure-play graph vendors like OrientDB as well as Amazon Neptune, IBM Graph and Microsoft Cosmos DB.

Other Contributions

DataStax’s engineers are also pleased to share some of the other great things that they work on with the open-source community.  These include:

• EngineBlock, a load generation and workload characterization tool
• CQL Data Modeler, a user-friendly front-end to cassandra-stress
• Simulacron, a simulator of the Cassandra Native Protocol

Coaching

From DataStax Academy to DataStax Developer Day to worldwide meetups, we pride ourselves on our commitment to coaching and educating developers on everything Apache Cassandra.

DataStax Academy has long been known for high quality, free training on both Apache Cassandra and DataStax Enterprise (DSE). We’ve recently refreshed our course catalog to reflect updates to the latest versions, including two courses that focus almost exclusively on Cassandra concepts:

• DS201: DataStax Enterprise 6 Foundations of Apache Cassandra®
• DS220: DataStax Enterprise 6 Practical Application Data Modeling with Apache Cassandra®

We continue to maintain an active DataStax Academy Slack community with hundreds of active community users and active participation from DataStax experts. We also produce and host the weekly Distributed Data Show and other how–to content directly and indirectly related to Cassandra and DSE.

Developer Days

The Developer Relations team at DataStax has been really excited to host this series of hands-on learning events this year in cities including San Francisco, New York, Washington DC, Chicago, Dallas, London, and Paris. We’ve offered dual tracks on both Cassandra and DSE at these events and the response has been extremely positive. Cassandra topics covered include data modeling, operations, drivers, and application development.

Meetups

DataStax’s Developer Relations team has also been active in the Cassandra meetup scene. In addition to working to inject new energy into Cassandra-focused meetups, we’re also getting the word out at other NoSQL / Big Data meetups, and hosting a monthly Distributed Systems meetup in Seattle. You can track where we’re headed next on our events page.

Conferences

In 2019, DataStax is bringing its experience in organizing the Cassandra Summit for six years to the Washington, DC metro area with a new conference: DataStax Accelerate.

Accelerate will feature cutting-edge content from DataStax experts and the Cassandra community for data architects, DBAs, Cassandra developers, IT administrators and architects, and IT executives. Accelerate will also include a full-day Cassandra Application Bootcamp that teaches the fundamentals for building an application with Apache Cassandra that can run everywhere.

Conclusion

DataStax has always been the home of the world’s top experts in Cassandra, and we continue to contribute to our community with the Three C’s: Code, Coaching, and Conferences. Check out our announcement of the new DataStax Distribution of Apache Cassandra and register here to attend or participate in the call for papers for DataStax Accelerate in May!