Apache Cassandra is a free and open-source distributed database. It is a Java-based, highly scalable, eventually consistent, wide column store. Cassandra database clusters are masterless with no single point of failure. Replication can be configured across multiple data centers. Originally influenced by Dynamo and BigTable, Cassandra was initially developed at and open sourced by Facebook before becoming a top-level Apache project. The CQL query language offers SQL-like data access and management. Drivers are available for a number of languages. This is a BETA version!