Cassandra has always been a highly performant distributed database, but not always simple to use though. Apache Cassandra 1.2 introduces some new features such as a Binary Protocol and Collections datatype that together with the now finalized CQL3 query language provide a new interface to communicate with Cassandra that dramatically shrink its learning curve and simplify its daily use while still relying on its highly scalable architecture and storage engine. This presentation will iterate over all these new features including an overview of CQL3 query language, a look at the new client architecture, and an update on data modeling best practices. Then we'll see how to implement an enterprise application using this new interface so that the audience can realize that a number of design principles are inspired from those commonly used with relational databases while some other entirely different, due to Cassandra partitioning approach.