Today is a big day for those of us in the Apache Cassandra community. I’ve been involved in the Cassandra project for almost 10 years now and I have seen a lot of ups and downs.

These were the early years of Cassandra, and as is typical in the 30- to 40-year typical lifespan of any database, it was a time of amazing growth in features and innovation.

Because of this, Cassandra earned the reputation as the database that wouldn’t let you down, though it was really hard to learn.

In the end, we agreed that a single statement embodies how we have to move forward, and it was adopted by the project: “The overarching goal of the 4.0 release is that Cassandra 4.0 should be at a state where major users would run it in production when it is cut.”

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