Yuki Morishita from DataStax gave a presentation on the new features in Apache Cassandra 4.0. Some of the key highlights include virtual tables that allow querying system data via SQL, transient replication which saves resources by using temporary replicas, audit logging for auditing queries and authentication, full query logging for capturing and replaying workloads, and zero-copy SSTable streaming for more efficient data transfer between nodes. Other notable changes include experimental Java 11 support, improved asynchronous messaging, removal of Thrift support, and changes to read repair handling.