The Last Pickle Joining DataStax

Today is a very emotional day: I’m happy, excited, and extremely proud to announce The Last Pickle has been acquired by DataStax.

I started contributing to the Apache Cassandra project in 2010, working by myself in my spare time. In March 2011, I left my job at Weta Digital and “went pro” becoming one of the first Apache Cassandra Consultants in the world. In 2013, Nate McCall joined me at The Last Pickle and we realised we could have a bigger impact on the world by working together. As the team at TLP grew over the years, so did our impact on the world. And with joining DataStax we are going to have the biggest impact possible.

We are at DataStax because we want to be. Because we have a shared passion to make Apache Cassandra the best database in the world, to make it easier to use, and to make it the first database people chose to use when starting a new project. Cassandra made large scale, highly available, databases an achievable goal for many companies around the world. For the first few years this was enough; it worked well enough if you knew how to take care of it. The addition of the Cassandra Query Language and improvements in operations expanded the user base as things got easier. But there is more work to do. We want to make open source Apache Cassandra easier to use at any scale, from 1 node to 1000, and to make it a realistic choice for every developer in the world.

The great level of technical understanding and kindness that the TLP team has given to the open source community, and importantly our customers, is not going away. The team is going to continue to help our customers as we always have, and will now be able to bring more resources when needed. Our contributions to the community are going to continue, and hopefully increase.

I’m extremely thankful to everyone that has worked at TLP over the years, everyone who has said nice things about us and helped us, and all of the customers who put their trust in my little company from New Zealand.

Thanks, Aaron

cassandra tlp datastax