May 2013 Summaries

Pearson Education is working towards providing education to anyone, anywhere on the planet through massive open online courses (MOOCs). They have partnered with Aurelius to apply graph theory and network science to this burgeoning space. The development of Titan, a distributed graph database, has enabled Pearson to handle large-scale educational data and support complex transactions at high speeds. Through the use of advanced algorithms and automation, they aim to provide computational human augmentation in the education space.

DataStax has released an ODBC driver for Apache Cassandra that can be used with both open source and DataStax Enterprise versions of the database. The driver, developed by Simba Corporation, is compliant with the latest ODBC 3.52 specification and runs on both 32 and 64-bit platforms. It allows users to connect to Cassandra clusters using popular BI tools like Tableau or Microsoft Excel. Currently in beta, the driver will be generally available soon.

Apache Cassandra has always been known for its scalable architecture, performance, and availability. However, early versions of Cassandra had a complex interface and data model that made learning difficult for developers. To address this issue, the Apache Cassandra team introduced CQL3, which provided a consistent interface across all languages and tools. Thrift, the traditional transport layer used by Cassandra, became a limitation as the database matured. In response, the CQL Native Protocol was introduced in Cassandra 1.2 to provide more flexibility for future features. DataStax has released version 1.0.0 of a new Java Driver designed for CQL and based on years of experience within the Cassandra community. This driver is the first step towards an environment free of any Thrift concepts, with object mapping and JDBC extension coming soon. Drivers for C# and other major languages are also in development.

The company is offering free ODBC drivers for Hadoop/Hive and introducing a new beta version of an ODBC driver for Cassandra on the Windows platform. The Hive driver, previously available for a fee, is now completely free. The Cassandra driver adheres to ODBC 3.52 standards, allowing users to connect to open source or DataStax Enterprise clusters from various BI, query, and ETL tools. However, the current version does not support CQL3, which will be addressed in a future release. Downloads are available on their drivers downloads page, with support for any questions.