Running Cassandra 1.2-beta on JDK 7 w/ Mac OSX: no snappyjava in java.library.path

The latest greatest Cassandra (1.2-beta) now uses snappy-java for compression.  Unfortunately for now, Cassandra uses 1.0.4.1 version of snappy-java.  That version of snappy-java doesn't play well with JDK 7 on Mac OSX.

There is a known bug:
https://github.com/xerial/snappy-java/issues/6

The fix is in the latest milestone release:
1.0.5-M3

Until that is formally released and Cassandra upgrades its dependency, if you want to run Cassandra under JDK 7 on Mac OSX, follow the instructions at the bottom of this issue.  Basically, unzip the snappy-java jar file and copy the jni library into $CASSANDRA_HOME.  You can see below that I used the jar file from my m2 repo.

bone@zen:~/.m2/repository/org/xerial/snappy/snappy-java/1.0.4.1-> unzip snappy-java-1.0.4.1.jar | grep Mac | grep jni
    44036  10-05-11 10:34   org/xerial/snappy/native/Mac/i386/libsnappyjava.jnilib
    49792  10-05-11 10:34   org/xerial/snappy/native/Mac/x86_64/libsnappyjava.jnilib

Copy the libsnappyjava.jnilib file into Cassandra, and you should be good to go.  If you used the version in your m2, thats:

cp ~/.m2/repository/org/xerial/snappy/snappy-java/1.0.4.1/org/xerial/snappy/native/Mac/x86_64/libsnappyjava.jnilib .

Alternatively, if you are building Cassandra from source, you can upgrade the snappy-java version yourself (in the build.xml).

BTW, Cassandra is tracking this under issue:
https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-4400