DataStax: Technical Achievement and Availability of 'Storage-Attached Indexing' Advancing Indexing

DataStax announced the technical achievement and availability of ‘Storage-Attached Indexing’, advancing indexing in Apache Cassandra.

Storage-Attached Indexing is a scalable, globally-distributed index for Apache Cassandra available on Astra and DataStax Enterprise (DSE).

The company has also opened a Cassandra Enhancement Proposal (CEP) with the Apache Cassandra project to share this with the open source community so all users of the popular, open source database can benefit.

Developers require a simple experience to leverage the power of Apache Cassandra for application development being an open-source, NoSQL database of the Internet’s largest applications and hardened by top enterprises.

Storage-Attached Indexing is an index in Apache Cassandra, making the open-source, scale-out, cloud-native NoSQL database more usable. With it, developers have accessibility to familiar indexing and queries – such as WHERE clauses – in Apache Cassandra.

“Developers have typically faced a trade-off between scalability, ease of use, and operations when choosing NoSQL,” said Ed Anuff, chief product officer, DataStax. “Storage-Attached Indexing gives developers robust, new indexing that eliminates many of these trade-offs, making development and data modeling in Apache Cassandra easier to use, while also increasing stability and performance and giving architects and operators fewer moving parts to manage.“

“Cassandra has proven itself to be a very fast and useful solution for us at GE Aviation. However, we have important use cases that require ad-hoc queries. To get around the current limitations, we have been using Solr with variable success. We are very excited about SAI. It has the potential to eliminate a huge pain point for us. It will further help the adoption of Cassandra and generally make the lves of many developers easier. This is definitely a step in the right direction for Cassandra,” said Julian Chultarsky, principal enterprise applications engineer, GE Aviation.

Storage-Attached Indexing is an index implementation that enables users to index multiple columns on the same table without scaling issues. It is optimized for storage and helps with Apache Cassandra performance and provides operational simplicity.

Benefits of storage-attached indexing include:

Improved stability
Significantly reduces disk usage
Improved numeric range performance
Releases constraints to data modeling and barriers to scale-out
Features modern and expected indexing features on Apache Cassandra

Storage-Attached Indexing is available in Astra and DSE 6.8.3. The company has also opened a Cassandra Enhancement Proposal (CEP) with the Apache Cassandra project.

Resources:
Try Storage-Attached Indexing on Astra via the interactive scenario
Blog: Better Cassandra Indexes for a Better Data Model: Introducing Storage-Attached Indexing
DataStax Astra: Cloud-Native Cassandra-as-a-Service
DataStax Enterprise: Scale-out data infrastructure for enterprises that need to handle any workload in any cloud
Blog: RUM Conjecture for Beginners
Storage-Attached Indexing documentation
Interactive scenario: Storage-Attached Indexing on Astra