CQL3 for Cassandra experts

Cassandra 1.2 is currently in beta, with final release planned before the end of the year. It introduces support for version 3 of the CQL language, which brings several improvements to the developer experience. The Thrift API remains supported and will continue to be backwards-compatible. Cassandra's storage engine design supports high-performance writes through a log-structured approach, allowing for efficient indexing and distributed counters. Denormalization is encouraged instead of joins, with wide, sparse rows being used to store data in the cell name as well as the value. CQL3 introduces several improvements over CQL2, including better representation of Cassandra's storage engine cells and support for more powerful indexing.