The cassandra-stress tool has been extended in Cassandra 2.1 to support stress testing arbitrary CQL tables and queries on that table. This makes testing data models simpler and helps users understand the tradeoffs they are making in their data model and settings. The new cassandra-stress now supports a YAML based profile that is used to define your specific schema with any potential compaction strategy, cache settings, and types you wish. The tool covers a lot of use cases but there are some things it can't do, which will be addressed in future releases.