Apache Cassandra commercial services company DataStax has this month offered its first Windows-based solution for non-production Cassandra development. Subsequent to polling its user-base and the Cassandra community to determine the most popular platforms used for development work, the company confirmed Mac OS X and Windows as the primary development platforms.
DataStax suggests that Cassandra is "moving into the mainstream" and supporting the needs of big data applications in terms of scalability, ease-of-use, and performance.
The new free offering will provide a graphical installer for Windows that bundles the latest edition of Cassandra, all key utilities including the Cassandra Query Language (CQL) interface, and an updated version of DataStax Opscenter Community Edition. For Mac developers, DataStax OpsCenter is also being made available on the platform for the first time.
"We want to ensure we're doing everything possible to make Cassandra easy to use for developers," said Jonathan Ellis, cofounder and CTO, DataStax and Apache Cassandra chair. "The new Windows installer and Mac support for OpsCenter make it possible for developers to get up and running with Cassandra in just a few minutes."
DataStax asserts that Cassandra is winning fans due to its high performance combined with linear scalability, no single points of failure, multi-data center support, and dynamic schema capabilities. Combining these features along with native optimization for the cloud and the ability to tackle big data workloads may have given Cassandra a boost towards being a more popular NoSQL platform for enterprise applications.
