At the Cassandra Summit conference that has recently concluded in Santa Clara, California, Avi Kivity, Dor Laor and Benny Schnaider have announced the release of ScyllaDB, a NoSQL database that they claim to be Apache Cassandra, rewritten in C++.

Cassandra is an open-source distributed database management system, a NoSQL database that can work with huge loads of data, across multiple clusters spread in different geographical data centers.

The Cassandra project was created in Facebook's offices by one of the people who later went on to help Amazon build DynamoDB, another NoSQL database.

The project was eventually open-sourced, and in 2009, it was handed over to the Apache Software Foundation, which has been managing it ever since.

Cassandra is written in Java, which is quite different from most other NoSQL databases like MongoDB and Redis, which are written in C++ and/or C.

This particularity is what drove developers to start work on ScyllaDB, creating a unique C++ framework called Seastar to help them port the Java code to a new async-based architecture that in the end has yielded a spectacular boost in performance.

According to ScyllaDB's creators, the database can handle 1 million transactions per second per server, is fully compatible with Cassandra, and can be dropped in without any modifications to the underlying code.

ScyllaDB and Seastar have been open-sourced and are available on GitHub.