Thrift versus the native protocol
Cassandra users fall into two general categories. The first category consists of those who have been using it for a while and have grown accustomed to working directly with storage rows via a Thrift-based client, and second, those who are relatively new to Cassandra and are confused by the role Thrift plays in the modern Cassandra world. Hopefully, we can clear up the confusion and set both groups on the right path. Thrift is an RPC mechanism combined with a code generator, and for several years it formed the underlying protocol layer for clients communicating with Cassandra. This allowed the early developers of Cassandra itself to focus on the database rather than the clients. But, as we hinted at in the introduction, there are numerous negative side effects of this strategy:
There was no common language to describe data models and queries as each client implemented different abstractions on top of the underlying Thrift protocol.
Thrift was limited to the...
