The document provides information about new features in Cassandra 2.2 and 3.0, including materialized views. Materialized views allow data to be pre-computed and denormalized to relieve the pain of manual denormalization. Materialized views are implemented by taking a write lock on the base table partition, reading the current values, constructing a batch log of delete and insert operations for the view, executing this asynchronously on the view replica, and then applying the base table update locally. This allows views to be kept in sync with the base table in an efficient manner.