I sympathize with that perspective. I was a huge Thrift fan five years ago. But it became clear early on that, despite your experience and mine, most people h

I sympathize with that perspective. I was a huge Thrift fan five years ago. But it became clear early on that, despite your experience and mine, most people had a really hard time wrapping their heads around Cassandra's Thrift API. Teaching CQL for the last 8 months has been a night and day difference. Ease of use does matter. It doesn't hurt either that CQL is substantially more performant [1]. Perhaps that will sweeten the pill for you. :) That said, while CQL may get the most publicity, we certainly haven't been neglecting the rest of the stack, e.g. [2], [3], [4], ... [1] https://twitter.com/karbonized1/status/369472202015399936 https://twitter.com/karbonized1/status/369472202015399936 [2] http://www.datastax.com/dev/blog/performance-improvements-in-cassandra-1-2 http://www.datastax.com/dev/blog/performance-improvements-in... [3] http://www.slideshare.net/jbellis/cassandra-summit-2013-keynote/27 http://www.slideshare.net/jbellis/cassandra-summit-2013-keyn... [4] http://www.datastax.com/dev/blog/lightweight-transactions-in-cassandra-2-0 http://www.datastax.com/dev/blog/lightweight-transactions-in...