In 2010, Apache Cassandra increased its momentum as the leading scalable database. Here is a summary of the notable activity in three areas: code, community and controversy. As always, comments are welcome. Code 2010 started with the release of Cassandra 0.5 , followed by 0.6 and graduation from the ASF incubator a few months later. Seven more stable releases of 0.6 proceeded, adding many features to improve operations in response to feedback from production users. 0.7 adds highly anticipated features like column value indexes , live schema updates , more efficient cluster expansion, and more control over replication, but didn't quite make it into 2010, with rc4 released on new year's 2011 . We also committed the distributed counters patchset, begun at Digg and enhanced by Twitter for their real-time analytics product . Notable as the most-involved feature discussion to date, distributed counters started with a vector clock approach , but switched to a new desig...