Cassandra 5.0
Cassandra 5.0 brings enhanced efficiency and scalability, performance, and memory optimizations to your applications. Additionally, it expands functionality support, accelerating your AI/ML journey and plays a pivotal role in the development of AI applications.
What is Cassandra 5.0
Apache Cassandra 5.0, the latest major version released in three years, brings numerous enhancements to existing features. This update also introduces new capabilities that enhance security and flexibility, improve performance, offer advanced data analysis tools and deliver new capabilities to support AI/ML workloads.
Aside from significant enhancements over previous releases, Cassandra 5.0 introduces a multitude of new features aimed at enhancing performance and security and adding support for new use cases.
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Storage-Attached Indexes (SAI)
SAI is a highly scalable, globally distributed index for Cassandra databases. With SAI, column-level indexes can be added leading to unparalleled I/O throughput for searches across different data types, including vectors. SAI also enables lightning-fast data retrieval through zero-copy streaming of indices, resulting in unparalleled efficiency.
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Vector Search
Vector Search is a powerful technique for searching relevant content or discovering connections by comparing similarities in large document collections, particularly useful for AI applications. It uses storage-attached indexing and dense indexing techniques to enhance data exploration and analysis.
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Unified Compaction Strategy
This unifies compaction approaches, including leveled, tiered, and time-windowed strategies. The strategy leads to a major reduction in SSTable sizes. Smaller SSTables mean better read and write performance, reduced storage requirements, and improved overall efficiency.
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Trie Memtables and Trie SSTables
Utilizes trie data structures to enhance the efficiency of both reads and writes, optimizing storage space and access speed.
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New Mathematical Functions
Expands CQL with additional mathematical functions like ‘abs’, ‘exp’, ‘log’, ‘log10’, and round and aggregation scalar CQL functions like ‘count’, ‘max’, ’min’, ‘sum’, ‘avg’ at a collection level enhancing support for complex analytics.
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Dynamic Data Masking
Strengthens security by allowing sensitive data to be masked from unauthorized access dynamically, ensuring data privacy and compliance.
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Stability and testing improvements
Cassandra 5.0 introduces numerous stability and testing improvements.
Benefits of Cassandra 5.0
Cassandra 5.0 simplifies data management with the unified compaction strategy, reducing the operational burden. Enhanced monitoring through virtual tables and stability improvements make it easier to maintain optimal performance and reliability.
Engineers can benefit from new features such as Storage Attached Indexes (SAI) AND vector search capabilities, significantly improving query efficiency and adding support for similarity search and advanced analytics. The new mathematical functions will give more flexibility to handle complex data operations.
Cassandra 5.0 will help optimize infrastructure, lower costs, and get started on the next generation of distributed computing with support for AI/ML workloads.
