apache/cassandra ? reverse-engineered prompt

I want to build a really powerful, distributed database system. It needs to be able to handle a massive amount of data and be extremely reliable. The main idea is that it can spread the data across many different servers, and if one of them goes down, the system just keeps working without any data loss.

It should feel familiar to someone who knows SQL, so let's organize the data into tables with rows and columns. We'll need to create a query language for it that's a lot like SQL, so users can CREATE TABLE, INSERT data, and run SELECT queries. The core database engine should be built in Java for performance. Also, please include a simple command-line client, maybe using Python, that lets a user connect to the database and run queries.