Datastax: Open source options also for the SAP community

It takes a village to raise a child, and it takes a reliable ecosystem to perfect a solution, said Mark White, Deloitte, during the opening keynote of Datastax Accelerate 2019. This phrase set the tone for the conference, which focused mainly on the collaboration between Datastax and the Apache Cassandra community.

The focus was on showing the community how invaluable their contributions are to the next generation of Apache Cassandra, Cassandra 4.0 - and how important it is to have a vendor on your side. That's why Datastax presented new solutions at Accelerate to make the community's life easier.

Datastax Constellation was the flagship product at Datastax Accelerate 2019. The cloud-native platform consists of Apache Cassandra as a Service, Datastax Insights and Datastax AppStax. These solutions are designed to facilitate the development of apps on the database and the analysis of important data.

"We want to simplify the complex Apache Cassandra solution - it should be fun"

explained Billy Bosworth, CEO of Datastax.

Cassandra 4.0 has been in development since 2016. As the most attended conference since the last major version change, Datastax Accelerate 2019 provided the ideal opportunity to tell developers and customers about new features and services.

"Many people have worked hard to make Cassandra 4.0 what it is today"

said Nate McCall, Apache PMC Chair and ASF member.

"No marketing team had a hand in this. The solution comes exclusively from developers."

As an open source project, Cassandra 4.0 relies on the community for both development and testing. Many large companies, such as Netflix and Apple, are currently testing the new database and were also willing to share their experiences at Datastax Accelerate 2019.

Both Apple and Netflix reported better stability, operability and latency as well as shorter recovery times. Netflix and Apple were not the only partners to take the stage at Accelerate to tell developers and customers about Cassandra 4.0 and other innovations.

In addition to Walgreens, Yahoo and Facebook, Intel was also there to talk about the possibility of persistent memory on Apache Cassandra. The project is still in its infancy, but Intel, Datastax and the Apache community are working closely together to put theory into practice.

The only question that was not definitively answered at Datastax Accelerate 2019 was what comes next. Cassandra 4.0 is being tested and continuously developed, Datastax Constellation makes it easier to use the complex database - and what next?

Nate McCall summarizes:

"What comes next? That's for the community to decide. After all, Cassandra is an open source project."