Courtesy of Anca Vamanu, of 1 & 1 Internet AG, Germany, a new module is available in the development version (to become the 3.3.0 release). Here is an adapted excerpt done for this web news from the announcement sent to mailing list.

“The module is named db_cassandra and offers a DB interface that can be used by other modules to perform DB operations instead of other DB modules (like db_mysql for example).

Because Cassandra is a NoSQL storage system, it is not possible to run all kind of SQL-like queries on it and this is the reason why the module has some limitations.

It is especially suited for applications that store large data or that require data distribution, redundancy or replication. One usage example is a distributed location system in a platform that has a cluster of SIP servers, with more proxies and registration servers accessing the same location database.

This was actually the main usage we had in mind when implementing the module. It has been tested with usrloc and auth_db modules, but it can also be used with other modules that have similar queries.

You can read more about this module in the README file:

Inside the module directory you can find an example that modifies the default configuration file to enable a location service with a Cassandra backend. If you have a Cassandra installation, it should be very easy to test it.

We hope you find this module useful and are glad to receive any feedback, comments about it.”