Billly Gates writes "The Apache Foundation released version 1.2 of Cassandra today which is becoming quite popular for those wanting more performance than a traditional RDBMS. You can grab a copy from this list of mirrors. This release includes virtual nodes for backup and recovery. Another added feature is 'atomic batches,' where patches can be reapplied if one of them fails. They've also added support for integrating into Hadoop. Although Cassandra does not directly support MapReduce, it can more easily integrate with other NoSQL databases that use it with this release"