DataStax Inc. said today it’s updating its commercial version of the Apache Cassandra database with significant enhancements to performance and ease of use.

DataStax Enterprise 6.0 is touted by the company as a high-availability, high-performance database that can be run in the cloud or on any on-premises hardware. Essentially it can be thought of as a spruced-up version of the Apache Cassandra database that’s designed for processing and storing high-speed, online transactional data. DSE 6.0 offers advantages including faster performance and easier installation and operation, with some additional features and professional support services should any problems crop up.

With the update, DataStax is ramping up the performance of its database to new heights. The company said DSE 6.0 is twice as fast as its predecessor, with double the throughput and user capacity and half the latency. In turn, this provides superior application responsiveness compared with what was possible before, the company said.

The reason for DSE 6.0’s accelerated performance lies is a fundamentally different architecture, Andrew Lampitt, senior director of product marketing at DataStax, told SiliconANGLE. Apache Cassandra uses an older, “staged event-driven architecture” that sometimes suffers from slowdowns when the database is handling too many tasks. DES 6.0 uses a newer architecture that maximizes the efficiency of the central processing unit cores used. It also includes improvements to its storage engine that help to improve latency while optimizing the compaction of data.

DataStax has also been working hard to make DSE 6.0 easier to use. To that end, the company has added three new features that help with this. The most important is something called DSE NodeSync, a new feature that eliminates the need for manual maintenance by ensuring data is synchronized in DSE clusters in a transparent and continuous fashion. In turn, this “frees resources to allow you to focus on the core business, and by making applications run more consistently, it also improves planning predictability,” Lampitt said.

As for the new DSE Upgrade Service, this is designed to automate all software upgrades with zero downtime. Finally, DSE TrafficControl helps to manage database traffic to provide additional resiliency, ensuring workloads always stay up and running in times of high demand.

“This is a milestone release for our customers, community and company. More than ever, this release truly delivers on the needs for power and simplicity of the Right-Now Enterprise,” said Billy Bosworth, chief executive officer of DataStax.

Image: DataStax