If you are relatively new to Cassandra, you may be unaware that the native client libraries from DataStax are a recent development. In fact, prior to their introduction, there were numerous libraries (and forks of those projects) just for the Java language. Throw in the other languages, each with their own idiosyncrasies, and you'd know that the situation was really quite dire.

Complicating the scenario was the lack of any universally accepted query mechanism as CQL was initially poorly received. The only real common ground to describe queries and data models was the underlying Thrift protocol. While this worked reasonably well for early adopters, it made assimilation of newer users quite difficult. It is a testament to Cassandra's extraordinary architecture, speed, and scalability that it was able to survive those early days.

After several revisions of CQL, the introduction of a native binary protocol, and...