Support for datastax 3.6.0 and its EOL

[joshita]

Hi,

I am currently using datastax driver 3.6.0, since all new development is happening with datastax 4.x, is there an EOL for 3.x, for how much time 3.6.0 would receive CEV fixes and security upgrades.

Regards

Joshita

[Madhavan Sridharan]

Hi Joshita, thank you for your questions!

Neither the 4.x nor the 3.x Java drivers are in maintenance mode at the moment. It is very much true that any new Java driver features will be developed on the 4.x branch and in general will not be ported to 3.x.  3.x will continue to receive CVE and other critical bug fixes but as mentioned there are no plans for this branch to receive any new features.  It's not completely impossible that a specific feature or two might make it's way to 3.x on a case-by-case basis but if you're planning for the future with 3.x you should do so with the expectation that it will receive no new features.

Having said that, I would strongly recommend and encourage you to upgrade to the 3.11.3 version of the java driver (released on Sep 20, 2022) which is directly binary compatible with the version that you're using today, 3.6.0 (released on Aug 30, 2018), to leverage features and fixes (including many CVE patches). In addition, I would also suggest you to sketch out a plan to upgrade your apps to 4.x driver or look into modernizing to interact with your Apache Cassandra®/DSE®/Astra DB® cluster via the Stargate® APIs.

<dependency>
  <groupId>com.datastax.cassandra</groupId>
  <artifactId>cassandra-driver-core</artifactId>
  <version>3.11.3</version>
</dependency>

<dependency>
  <groupId>com.datastax.cassandra</groupId>
  <artifactId>cassandra-driver-mapping</artifactId>
  <version>3.11.3</version>
</dependency>

<dependency>
  <groupId>com.datastax.cassandra</groupId>
  <artifactId>cassandra-driver-extras</artifactId>
  <version>3.11.3</version>
</dependency>

Warm regards,

Madhavan