Apache Cassandra is a free and open-source NoSQL DBMS that is distributed, wide column store, and can handle large amounts of data across commodity servers. This leaves no single point of failure and makes for high availability. Cassandra comes from Avinash Lakshman and Prashant Malik. Together, they developed Cassandra at Facebook to power the inbox search feature we see today. In July of 2008, Facebook released it as an open-source project on Google code and by March of 2009, it was an Apache Incubator project. As we stepped into 2010, it graduated to a top-level project.

Etymologically, Cassandra is a Trojan mythological prophet that became a figure of epic tradition and tragedy through a curse on an oracle.