Improvements on the driver side with Cassandra 2.0

CQL (Cassandra Query Language) was tagged production ready in Cassandra 1.2 and brought along the CQL Native Protocol as a replacement for Thrift. Despite improvements, limitations remained when using batch prepared statements, blobs in non-prepared statements, or paging over large results. Cassandra 2.0 introduced enhancements to address these issues. It allows developers to batch Prepared Statements and supports parameterized statements that accept question mark placeholders and parameters like prepared statements. Automatic paging was also introduced in Cassandra 2.0, allowing developers to iterate through an entire ResultSet without having to manually page over results. This feature provides a transparent failover mechanism between page responses using a paging state returned with each result page.