We have seen CQL 3 add big leaps in Cassandra usability. It is easier to understand for someone moving from SQL development to Cassandra. At the same time, to a Thrift developer, it is again a rework to rewire the map-of-maps schema-free structure of Cassandra to the transposed version of that.
Cassandra 1.2 has been a nice upgrade. It strengthens CQL 3 by adding syntactic sugar to storage techniques to provide collections support. CQL 3 is laconic and supported by all leading programming languages. Apart from CQL, VNodes are the other major development. VNodes is extremely useful for mid-to-large Cassandra setup. VNodes alleviates the load generated by ring alteration by distributing responsibility to stream out across a larger number of nodes and by making the bootstrap process more parallel. A side effect of this load balancing task gets solved automatically. There are other smaller performance boosts for version 1.2.
Cassandra 2.0 is proposed in the latter half of 2013. It will...