The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) has announced Apache Cassandra v1.2. According to the announcement, this version of the big data distributed database can handle thousands of requests per second and can power massive data sets quickly and reliably without compromising performance.

The latest version of the Cassandra NoSQL database includes clustering across virtual nodes, internode communication, atomic batches, and request tracing. According to the website, Cassandra provides linear scalability and proven fault-tolerance on commodity hardware or cloud infrastructure. Data is automatically replicated to multiple nodes for fault-tolerance, and failed nodes can be replaced with no downtime. Cassandra v1.2 also marks the release of version 3 of the Cassandra Query Language (CQL3), which simplifies application modeling, allows for more powerful mapping, and alleviates design limitations through more natural representation.

“By improving support for dense clusters – powering multiple terabytes per node – as well as simplifying application modeling, and improving data cell storage/design/representation, systems are able to effortlessly scale petabytes of data,” said Jonathan Ellis, Vice President of Apache Cassandra.

Apache Cassandra v1.2 is released under the Apache License v2.0. Cassandra releases include the core server, the nodetool administration command-line interface, and a development shell (cqlsh and the old cassandra-cli ).