Upgrading Cassandra and Troubleshooting - Beginning Apache Cassandra Development - page 286

This command will return all followers having the full name “milan kundera”.
One more change worth discussing is that Cassandra 2.1 doesn't support the sstable
format of versions earlier than Cassandra 2.x, which leads to the important question of
how to handle version upgrades! In the next section, we will discuss how to handle ver-
sion upgrades with Cassandra.
Upgrading Cassandra Versions
In the last year and a half, Cassandra has seen the rapid releases of multiple versions of
Cassandra, including 1.2.x, 2.0.x, and 2.1.x. The reasons for the parallel development
on multiple versions were maintenance, priority bug fixes, and rolling out version 2.0.
Version 2.0 came with many new feature sets, which we discussed in Chapter 2 .
Applications using Cassandra as a database also required upgrades to their newest
releases. Ideally it should be a smooth ride, but major version changes came with
format changes in sstables and brought in version restrictions.
The volume of releases since last summer is displayed in Figure 11-1 , which shows
the many Cassandra releases since August 2013 and that parallel development is re-
quired on the Cassandra side for maintenance and feature releases. Maintenance re-
leases can also be termed as minor releases, such as critical bug fixes, whereas major
releases focus primarily on new feature support and performance fixes.