Apache Cassandra is an open source NoSQL distributed database trusted by thousands of companies for scalability and high availability without compromising performance.
This is the official documentation for Apache Cassandra. If you would like to contribute to this documentation, you are welcome to do so by submitting your contribution like any other patch following these instructions.
Unmaintained older versions of Cassandra are archived here. CVE fixes may be applied to unmaintained versions as decided on a case-by-case basis. The PGP keys used to sign releases are available in this KEYS file.
Read through the Cassandra Basics to learn main concepts and how Cassandra works at a high level. To understand Cassandra in more detail, head over to the Docs. Browse through the Case Studies to learn how other users in our worldwide community are getting value out of Cassandra.
Since it is a distributed database, Cassandra can (and usually does) have multiple nodes. A node represents a single instance of Cassandra. These nodes communicate with one another through a protocol called gossip, which is a process of computer peer-to-peer communication.
Cassandra was initially designed at Facebook using a staged event-driven architecture (SEDA). This initial design implemented a combination of Amazon’s Dynamo distributed storage and replication techniques and Google’s Bigtable data and storage engine model.
The Cassandra project is happy to announce the general availability of Apache Cassandra® 5.0! This major release marks a significant milestone in the evolution of the world’s most powerful distributed database used by over 30,000 organizations worldwide.
Cassandra 5.0 introduces vector search, which leverages storage-attached indexing and dense indexing techniques to transform data exploration and analysis. This update is especially impactful for domains like machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI).
Install the RPM build on CentOS and RHEL-based distributions if you want to install Cassandra using YUM. Install the Debian build on Ubuntu and other Debian-based distributions if you want to install Cassandra using APT.
Cassandra’s default configuration file, cassandra.yaml, is sufficient to explore a simple single-node cluster. However, anything beyond running a single-node cluster locally requires additional configuration to various Cassandra configuration files.
