PlanetCassandra #17 - CQLite: Query Cassandra SSTables Without a Cluster

​What if you could open Cassandra data files and query them the way you'd open a SQLite database? Join us for a first look at CQLite — a new high-performance Rust library and CLI from Cassandra committer Patrick McFadin that reads Apache Cassandra® 5.0+ SSTables directly. No cluster required.

​What We'll Cover

• ​The Problem: Working with SSTable data has always meant standing up a cluster — heavyweight for analytics, testing, migrations, and edge scenarios.

• ​The Solution: CQLite — a Rust-native library and CLI that parses Cassandra 5.0+ SSTables and runs CQL queries against them locally, SQLite-style.

• ​Core Capabilities:

  • ​Local CQL: partition and clustering key queries, with a REPL and one-shot CLI modes

  • ​Export & Interop: JSON, CSV, Parquet, and CQL output — plus an Arrow Flight server for federated queries via Trino

  • ​Write Path: memtable flushing that produces portable, Cassandra-compatible SSTables, with byte-for-byte compaction parity

  • ​Bindings: production-ready Python and Node.js bindings, and support for LZ4, Snappy, Zstd, and Deflate compression

• ​Live Demo: browsing SSTables, running queries, and exporting data straight from the terminal

• ​The Road Ahead: the path toward donating CQLite to the Apache Cassandra project — and how you can get involved

​About the Speaker

​Patrick McFadin is one of the most recognizable voices in the Apache Cassandra community — an Apache Cassandra committer and PMC member, ASF Member, and co-author of the O'Reilly book "Managing Cloud Native Data on Kubernetes." Over more than two decades building scale infrastructure — including years as Chief Evangelist for Apache Cassandra at DataStax and Principal Technical Strategist at IBM — Patrick has helped organizations run some of the largest Cassandra deployments in production and has spent his career educating developers on distributed data. Today he leads McFadin Data and AI Advisory, and CQLite is his latest project: bringing SQLite-style local access to the Cassandra ecosystem.

​Who Should Attend

• ​Cassandra developers, DBAs, and SREs who work with SSTable data

• ​Data platform and analytics engineers interested in offline access, Parquet export, and Trino federation

• ​Rust and open-source enthusiasts curious about modern Cassandra tooling