Cassandra and Windows: Past, Present, and Future

Cassandra on Windows has been a topic of interest for years. Although it is now endorsed and supported for development purposes only, there are known issues that prevent its recommendation for production environments. The main issue lies in file deletion, which is critical for database operations. However, with the introduction of JDK7's new I/O library, Cassandra 3.0 aims to resolve these errors by allowing file deletion while other processes have handles open to them. Memory-mapped file I/O on Windows remains a challenge due to technical limitations, but disabling it in the upcoming 2.1.3 release should improve performance. Cassandra's launch scripts for Windows have been rewritten and improved, making the development and usage environment smoother. The target for official Windows support is Cassandra-3.0, with a focus on replicating page cache optimizations currently available in Linux only.