Hi all, Last September, Jonathan Ellis announced at ApacheCon NA <https://youtu.be/AOXmxicN_tg?t=314> that DataStax was going to unify the drivers that we develop for Apache Cassandra and DataStax Enterprise into a single open-source, Apache v2.0 Licensed driver. Yesterday, we released this new version of the drivers across our C++, C#, Java, Node.js and Python drivers. See the blog post <https://www.datastax.com/blog/2020/01/better-drivers-for-cassandra> for links to the source code and documentation.
With this unified driver, we are committing to developing all of our new functionality in this single driver going forward, available for all Cassandra users and not just DataStax customers. This means that the following are now available for all users: Java: Spring Boot Starter This starter is currently available in DataStax Labs <https://github.com/datastax/labs/tree/master/spring-boot-starter/20190903>, our goal is to get it into the Spring Boot project. Also of note, Mark Paluch <https://spring.io/team/mp911de> and the team that works on Spring Data Cassandra recently completed their upgrade to the 4.x line of the Java Driver ( DATACASS-656 <https://jira.spring.io/browse/DATACASS-656> ). Java: Built-in support for Reactive programming This new version of the Java Driver ( v4.4.0 ) now has an executeReactive method on CqlSession for those working with Reactive Streams. See the documentation <https://docs.datastax.com/en/developer/java-driver/latest/manual/core/reactive/> for details. Java, Node.js: New Load Balancing Policy The Java and Node.js drivers now have a new load balancing policy that uses the in-flight request count for each node to drive the Power of 2 Choices <https://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~michaelm/postscripts/mythesis.pdf> decision and takes into account the dequeuing rate of the in-flight requests to avoid slow nodes. In addition, the amount of time that a node has been UP is also considered when creating the query plan to only send requests to nodes when they are ready. We are also working to get this into the C++, C# and Python drivers soon. Python: Pre-Built Wheels Previously we only had pre-built wheels for the DSE driver but now they are available for everyone to use in this new version of the driver ( v3.21.0 ). Along with the bulk loader and Kafka connector <https://www.datastax.com/blog/2019/12/tools-for-apache-cassandra> that we made available for use with Apache Cassandra in December last year, we hope that this helps simplify the picture for those that use our drivers. Best, Chris