Managing your Astra DB database

As a database administrator, you can manage your database. This includes the following tasks:

Create your database

Complete the following steps to create and launch your DataStax Astra DB database.

Procedure

In your Astra DB dashboard, select Create Database.

If you need more options, contact DataStax Support.
Enter your basic details:
- Database Name: Name your database something meaningful. The database name cannot be altered after the database is created. Use only alphanumeric characters; there is no character limit.
- Keyspace Name: Name your keyspace to reflect your data model. You cannot name your keyspace “dse” or “system”. Use only alphanumeric characters and no more than 48 total characters.

Select your cloud provider and then the region where you want to launch your database from the region menu, which reflects the available regions based on your selected cloud provider.

Regions with the lock symbol require payment. When selecting a region with a lock, you have to option to upgrade to a Pay-as-you-go-plan. If you select a region without a lock, you are still on the Free plan.

You can preview the costs for the database based on read and write requests, storage, and data transfer.

Select Create Database. The Database Created! page appears.
1. Click X at the top right of the screen to return to your Astra DB dashboard.
2. Click Generate Token to download tokens generated for you.
An alert appears at the top of the screen when your database is created.

Results

You are redirected to your Organization Dashboard. The new database and status is shown under Databases. You will receive an email when your database creation is complete. Select the database name to manage or connect with your new database.

View your databases

View all databases in your organization, and select a database to view detailed information about the database.

The Dashboard shows all of your databases within your organization, including databases you created and databases created by other team members. From here, you can select an individual database name to manage and connect those databases.

Selecting a database in DataStax Astra DB provides access to detailed information about the database. You can view the keyspaces, size and location of the database, and the estimate cost per hour.

Open a browser, navigate to Astra DB, and log in.
Select a database from the Databases option in the left navigation or from Recent Resources on the home page.
Click the Overview tab.

You can only view connection details and database management operations for databases that you created.
You can see several database details from this tab:
- Database Name
- Status
- Usage for current billing period
  - Read Requests
  - Write Requests
  - Storage Consumed
  - Data Transfer
- Compute Size [Only for Classic tier databases]
- Replication Factor [Only for Classic tier databases]
- Current Capacity [Only for Classic tier databases]
- Regions
  - Provider
  - Area
  - Region
  - Datacenter ID
  - Region Availability
- Keyspaces

Database statuses

Your database can exist in a range of statuses. These statuses vary based on the actions you take within your database.

To see the system status of Astra, see https://status.astra.datastax.com/.

To see the status of a specific database, view your database Dashboard.

All databases

Active

Your database is available and ready to use.

Initializing

You’ve made your database selections. It should be ready for you to use soon.

Terminating/Terminated

You have terminated your database, which means your database and all data on your database will be removed. Your database is no longer available.

Error

Something is wrong with your database. Contact DataStax Support.

Maintenance

When a database is moving into hibernated or restarting from hibernated, your database will display that it is in the Maintenance status.

Hibernated

When an Astra DB database on the Free plan has been unused for more than 48 hours, it will automatically enter the Hibernated status.

It may take a few minutes for your hibernated Astra DB database to resume (return to Active status).

Database hibernation only occurs on the Free plan. Hibernated does not occur on the Astra DB paid plans. To avoid Hibernated, and to take full advantage of additional Astra DB functionality, upgrade from the Free plan to a Pay As You Go plan, or to an Enterprise plan. For details, see Pricing and billing.

To view the status of any database within your organization,

Open your Astra DB dashboard.
1. If you have more than one database in a hibernated status, a banner appears at the top of the screen prompting you to click Resume Databases.
To activate a specific database, navigate to the Databases table on your dashboard. Select the database(s) to activate.
1. Click Resume to activate a hibernated database.
2. Hover Hibernated for a quick definition of this term.
3. Click the database name to open it, but remain in the hibernated status.

Classic databases

Parking

You parked your database. It is in the process of being parked and cannot be used again until you unpark your database.

Parked

You parked your database. It is unavailable and cannot be used again until you unpark your database.

Unparking

You unparked your database. It is unavailable until it is fully unparked and Active again.

Resizing

Scale up your database to change your capacity. Your database has limited functionality while it is resized.

Monitor your databases

View connection details, performance metrics, and health details for databases in your organization.

The Databases page provides an overview of all databases in your organization, including the databases you created and databases created by other team members. However, only a database creator can make changes to a database and view its connection details, which can be shared manually with other team members.

View your databases

View all databases in your organization, and select a database to view detailed information about the database.

Selecting a database in DataStax Astra DB provides access to detailed information about the database. You can view the keyspaces, size and location of the database, and the estimate cost per hour.

Open a browser, navigate to Astra DB, and log in.
Select a database from the Databases option in the left navigation or from Recent Resources on the home page.
Click the Overview tab.

You can only view connection details and database management operations for databases that you created.
You can see several database details from this tab:
- Database Name
- Status
- Usage for current billing period
  - Read Requests
  - Write Requests
  - Storage Consumed
  - Data Transfer
- Compute Size [Only for Classic tier databases]
- Replication Factor [Only for Classic tier databases]
- Current Capacity [Only for Classic tier databases]
- Regions
  - Provider
  - Area
  - Region
  - Datacenter ID
  - Region Availability
- Keyspaces

View health and metrics

Select a database to view health metrics and performance information. When selecting a database, you can view health metrics that include information regarding latency and throughput to the database. These metrics provide insights into the performance of the database and how workloads are distributed.

When viewing information about a database on the Health page, select the region from the dropdown available at the right to view the health metrics of the database particular to that region. This is only applicable for multi-region databases.

View health dashboard

Open a browser, navigate to DataStax Astra DB, and log in.
On the Databases page, select the database name to view details for. Details for the database display on the Overview tab.
To view health metrics for the database, select the Health tab.
Select the time period to display in the health metrics for.

View health dashboard in full window

Select Cycle View Mode in the upper right corner. This selection displays the cycle view.
Press Esc.
Select the share icon in the upper left corner.
Copy the URL.
Paste the URL in a new browser tab or window to see the dashboard.

Results

Metrics for the database display in the Grafana dashboard embedded in Astra Portal. To view more granular metrics, hover over a specific time in the graph. Read and write latencies display in nanoseconds.

Request Overview

Requests Combined

Displays request rates (req/s) for different types of requests. The rates are summed over all database coordinators.

Request Errors

Displays the request error rates (req/s) for different types of requests. The rates are summed over all database coordinators.

Timeouts indicate that the queries are taking too long to complete.
Unavailables indicate that the coordinator did not have enough alive data nodes to work with.
Failures can be caused by queries violating certain guardrails or other error conditions. For more, see Astra DB database guardrails and limits.

Writes

Write Latency: Displays coordinator write request latency quantiles on the left y-axis and the total write request rate (req/s) on the right y-axis.
Write Size Distribution: Displays different write request mutation size quantiles. Large mutations can cause performance problems and might even be rejected.

Reads

Read Latency: Displays coordinator read request latency quantiles on the left y-axis, and the total read request rate (req/s) on the right y-axis.
Range Latency: Displays coordinator range request latency quantiles on the left y-axis, and the total range request rate (req/s) on the right y-axis.

Stargate

Stargeate

Connected Clients: Displays the number of CQL connections

Lightweight Transactions (LWTs)

health lwt

Column Access Strobe (CAS) Write Latency: Displays coordinator CAS write request latency quantiles on the left y-axis, and the total CAS write request rate (req/s) on the right y-axis.
CAS Write Contention: Displays coordinator CAS write request contention quantiles on the left y-axis and the number of unfinished commits on the right y-axis.

A high number of contended requests negatively affect request latency and cause timeouts. Reduce the number of concurrent requests to the same partition. Unfinished commits cause increased latency. Reducing contention can help reduce the number of unfinished commits.

CAS Read Latency: Displays coordinator CAS read request latency quantiles on the left y-axis, and the total CAS read request rate (req/s) on the right y-axis.
CAS Read Contention: Displays coordinator CAS read request contention quantiles on the left y-axis, and the number of unfinished commits on the right y-axis.

Tombstones

Tombstones Scanned / s: Displays the number of tombstones being scanned per keyspace, table, and second. A large number of tombstones can cause increased latency or query failures.
Tombstone Guardrail Warnings / s: Displays the number of queries exceeding the tombstone guardrail warning threshold per keyspace, table, and second. For more, see Astra DB database guardrails and limits.
Tombstone Guardrail Failures / s: Displays the number of queries exceeding the tombstone guardrail failure threshold per keyspace, table, and second. For more, see Astra DB database guardrails and limits.

Manage multiple keyspaces

In Astra, keyspaces hold the datacenter names associated with your Astra regions and defines the replication factor (3 for writes in LOCAL_QUORUM) for each datacenter. A replication factor of 3 ensures against losing your data. You can create keyspaces either with the Astra Dashboard or the DevOps API. Use the instructions below to delete a keyspace with your Astra account, if necessary.

Creating a database with multiple keyspaces allows you to create different data models for each keyspace or store unique data in unique keyspaces. Multiple keyspaces within a single region allows for an application built on a per-keyspace data model.

Adding a new keyspace

Open a browser, navigate to Astra DB, and log in.

On the Dashboard page, select the database name to access the Overview page for your selected database.

Select Add Keyspace.

Enter the new keyspace name. When creating your new keyspace name, make sure you meet the following requirements:
- No empty spaces or null
- A maximum of 48 characters
- Only use alphanumeric characters and/or underscores

Select Save.

Your list of keyspaces displays on the Overview page for your database.

Deleting a keyspace

If you delete a keyspace, all data in that keyspace is removed and cannot be recovered.

Open a browser, navigate to DataStax Astra DB, and log in.

On the Dashboard page, select the database name to access the Overview page for your selected database.

Select the overview menu (…) for the keyspace you want to delete.

Select Delete.

In the Delete keyspace menu, type in the name of the keyspace to delete.

Select Delete Keyspace.

Your list of keyspaces will be updated on the Overview page to show only the remaining keyspaces for your database.

Using multiple regions

You can replicate data to multiple regions for high availability scenarios to ensure active-active applications failover models. Multiple regions also ensure application data availability for locality purposes with the added value of cost savings.

Having multiple regions increase may your billing. For more, see Pricing and billing.

Video introduction

See this short video introduction to the Astra DB multi-region implementation:

Eventual consistency model and multi-region updates

DataStax Astra DB follows the eventual consistency model. Depending on the selected consistency level, data written to one region might not be immediately accessible to other regions in the same database.

If you are using the EACH_QUORUM consistency level for normal updates or SERIAL consistency level for Lightweight Transactions (LWT), then data is immediately accessible on all regions provided the operation successfully completes. These consistency levels are for only write requests.

For all other consistency levels, data might not be immediately accessible. The time span is normally within a few minutes to fully replicate the data. However, it could take longer, and possibly span one or more days. There are several contributing factors to the latter scenario, such as the workload volume, the number of regions, the data repair operations, and network resources.

For more, see the FAQs in this topic.

Data sovereignty

Astra DB serverless replicates all data in the database to all of a database’s regions. By contrast, multiple keyspaces in Apache Cassandra® and DataStax Enterprise (DSE) allow a database to replicate some tables to a subset of regions. To achieve the same behavior as Cassandra or DSE, create a separate Astra DB instance that adheres to the necessary region restrictions. The database client will need to add a separate connection for the additional database and send queries to the appropriate connection depending on the table being queried.

Classic databases

If you are adding multiple regions to your database, you can use each region only once. You cannot add the same region to the same database more than one time.

Adding a region to your classic database

Open a browser, navigate to DataStax Astra, and log in.

On the Dashboard page, select the database name to access the Overview page for your selected database.

Select Add Region.

Select the region you want to add from the Add Region menu.

Select Add.

Confirm you want to add the region by selecting Confirm.

You’ll see a screen confirming the new datacenter region is being added. Once you add a region, a maintenance period starts that might take up to 30 minutes. Your database will have limited availability during this window. Some actions, such as viewing database connection details, might be unavailable until maintenance is finished.

Removing a region from your database

Open a browser, navigate to DataStax Astra, and log in.

On the Dashboard page, select the database name to access the Overview page for your selected database.

Select Remove Region from the overflow menu for the region you want to remove.

Enter your datacenter id, which is provided in the prompt.

Select Remove region.

Removing a region is not reversible. Proceed with caution.

You’ll see a screen confirming the datacenter location will be removed. Once you remove a location, a maintenance period starts that might take up to 30 minutes. Your database will have limited availability during this window. Some actions, such as viewing database connection details, might be unavailable until maintenance is finished.

What’s next?

See additional database management topics.

Terminating your database

When you no longer need a database, terminate it to reduce costs and streamline operations. When you terminate a database, all data is permanently deleted and cannot be recovered.

If you have administrator privileges in the DataStax Astra Portal for your team, you can contact DataStax to terminate databases that are owned by other team members. For example, if a team member leaves your organization and you want to delete their databases, contact DataStax with the names of the databases owned by that team member.

Procedure

See instructions on how to terminate a multi-region database here.

Open a browser, navigate to Astra DB, and log in.
From the Dashboard page, select the overflow menu for the database you want to terminate and select Terminate.

All data in the database will be permanently deleted. You cannot restart the database. Proceed with caution.
To terminate the database, type in the database name you want to terminate and select Terminate.

Results

Your database is removed from the list of available databases. You will receive an email when your database is successfully terminated.

Resizing your classic database

Scale up databases based on your needs. You may need to increase the capacity of your DataStax Astra DB database. If a database is growing quickly or exceeding capacity, add another capacity unit (CU) to expand the storage and capabilities of the database.

Scaling down is not supported.

This information applies to only classic databases.

You can increase your database by a maximum of three CUs. Multiple resize operations are required to add more CUs beyond the maximum number.

Consider the following conditions when resizing databases:

You must be the owner of a database to resize it.
Databases can only be increased in size to add more CUs.
Databases running on the Developer tier cannot be resized.
You cannot modify the compute size of existing databases.

Procedure

Open a browser, navigate to Astra DB, and log in.
From the Dashboard page, select the overflow menu for the database you want to resize and select Expand CUs.

In the Expand CUs window, modify the number of CUs for your database.

The total amount of storage and estimated cost changes dynamically based on the number of CUs entered.

You cannot increase your cluster by more than 3 CUs at a time. To increase your cluster by more than 3 CUs, increase them in intervals of 3 CUs at a time until you reach the total CUs you need for your database. The maximum is 20 CUs for your database.

You cannot decrease your cluster. If you need to decrease your cluster, contact DataStax Support.

Select Expand to begin resizing the database.
Confirm you want to expand your database to your specified size by selecting Yes.

Results

You receive a confirmation that you database is scheduled for expansion. Your database remains active while resizing, but you have limited administrative functions. Your database status changes to Resizing until the resizing is complete.

When your database is successfully resized, you receive an email and a link to the database.

Park databases

Park a database to reduce costs and manage resources efficiently. Parking a database suspends the database but does not destroy it. Parked databases are available to unpark when the database needs to be active again. The cost of parking a database is only the storage cost from the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) provider.

This information applies only to existing Classic customers.

Effective May 6th, 2022, this feature was deprecated for all new customers. Please contact DataStax support if you have any questions.

Parking provides an effective means for managing costs and ensuring that databases are running only when needed. When parking a database, the DataStax Cloud console calculates the estimated cost of parking the database versus the cost of keeping the database running.

You can resume your parked databases at any time. If database operations are issued for a parked database, those operations will not be implemented until the database is unparked.

When viewing details for a database, click the ellipsis (...) next to the database name to access the Park option.

Procedure

Open a browser, navigate to DataStax Astra DB, and log in.
From the Dashboard page, select Park for the database you want to park.
To park the database, select Park Database.

Results

The status of the database changes to Parking until the database is parked; the status then changes to Parked.

You cannot make changes to your database while the status is Parking.

The database is parked and remains in that state until you unpark it. The only cost incurred while the database is parked is storage cost from your selected cloud provider.

You will receive an email when your database is successfully parked, along with a link to the database.

Unpark databases

Unpark a database to place it into an active state and use the database again.

This information applies only to existing Classic customers.

Effective May 6th, 2022, this feature was deprecated for all new customers. Please contact DataStax support if you have any questions.

Procedure

Open a browser, navigate to DataStax Astra DB, and log in.
From the Dashboard page, select Unpark for the database you want to unpark.
To unpark the database, select Unpark Database.

Results

The status of the database changes to Unparking until the database is parked; the status then changes to Active.

You cannot make changes to your database while the status is Unparking.

You will receive an email when your database is successfully unparked, along with a link to the database.

The database remains Active until you park it again. The only cost incurred while the database is parked is storage cost from your selected cloud provider.