Apache Cassandra Project Initiated at Facebook

Inspired by Amazon's Dynamo and Google's BigTable, Avinash Lakshman and Prashant Malik at Facebook develop Cassandra as a highly scalable, eventually consistent database to power their inbox search feature.

Significance

This event laid the foundation for the database that DataStax Drivers would later be built to interact with, defining the distributed, NoSQL paradigm that the drivers needed to manage.