About your Astra DB database

Welcome! Let’s cover some basics and review how you can get connected.

Your paid database starts the following specifications:

  • A single region

  • A single keyspace

  • Storage based on your selected plan

  • Capacity for up to 200 tables

  • Replication factor of three to provide optimal uptime and data integrity

To better understand your database capabilities, review the Astra DB database guardrails and limits.

View your subscription plans

DataStax offers several subscription plans to meet your needs. For details about each plan, see the pricing page.

  1. In the Astra Portal, click Billing.

  2. Under Billing Details, locate the Subscription box to see the type of subscription you have.

Production Workloads with Dedicated Resources

VPC peering and multi-region databases are available on Production Workload databases.

Plan Description

C20

24 vCPU, 96GB DRAM, 500GB total usable storage

C40

48 vCPU, 192GB DRAM, 500GB total usable storage

C40i

48 vCPU, 192GB DRAM, 500GB total usable storage, High IOPS

The following plan is no longer available:

C10: 12 vCPU, 48GB DRAM, 500GB total usable storage

High-Density Production Workloads with Dedicated Resources

High-Density Production Workload databases offer greater disk capacity and performance than other service tiers. VPC peering and multi-region databases are available on High-Density Product Workload databases.

Plan

Description

D10

12 vCPU, 48GB DRAM, 1500GB total usable storage

D20

24 vCPU, 96GB DRAM, 1500GB total usable storage

D40

48 vCPU, 192GB DRAM, 1500GB total usable storage

Astra DSE Edition Workloads

Databases with the advanced functionality of DSE Search and DSE Graph Workloads available on Production Workload databases.

Plan

Description

E60

48 vCPU, 366GB DRAM, 2TB total usable storage

E120

96 vCPU, 732GB DRAM, 2TB total usable storage

Database regions

When creating a database, select a region for your database. Choose a region that is geographically close to your users to optimize performance.

If you add multiple regions to your database, you can use each region only once.

Classic database regions

AWS

Region Location Pricing

ap-south-1

Mumbai

Standard

ap-southeast-1

Singapore

Standard

ap-southeast-2

Sydney

Standard

ap-northeast-1

Tokyo

Standard

ca-central-1

Montréal

Standard

eu-central-1

Frankfurt

Standard

eu-west-1

Ireland

Standard

eu-west-2

London

Standard

us-east-1

Virginia

Standard

us-east-2

Ohio

Standard

us-west2

Oregon

Standard

Google Cloud

Region Location Pricing

asia-east1

Changhua County, Taiwan

Standard

asia-east2

Hong Kong

Premium

australia-southeast1

Sydney, Australia

Premium

europe-north1

Hamina, Finland

Standard

europe-west1

St. Ghislain, Belgium

Standard

europe-west4

Eemshaven, Netherlands

Standard

northamerica-northeast1

Montréal, Québec

Standard

us-central1

Council Bluffs, Iowa

Standard

us-east1

Moncks Corner, South Carolina

Standard

us-east4

Ashburn, Virginia

Standard

us-west1

The Dalles, Oregon

Standard

Azure

Region Location Pricing

australiaeast

New South Wales

Standard

australiasoutheast

Victoria

Standard

centralcanada

Toronto

Standard

eastus

Virginia

Standard

northeurope

Ireland

Standard

westeurope

Netherlands

Standard

westus2

Washington

Standard

How do you want to connect?

Options Description

I want to start using my database now with APIs.

Use the Stargate APIs on Astra to interact with your database and self manage the schema.

I have an application and want to use the DataStax drivers.

Initialize one of the DataStax drivers to manage database connections for your application.

I know CQL and want to connect quickly to use my database.

Use the integrated CQL shell or the standalone CQLSH tool to interact with your database using CQL.

Astra DB database guardrails and limits

DataStax Astra DB includes guardrails and sets limits to ensure good practices, foster availability, and promote optimal configurations for your databases.

Astra DB offers a $25.00 free credit per month, allowing you to create an Astra DB database for free. Create a database with just a few clicks and start developing within minutes.

Limited access to administrative tools

Because Astra DB hides the complexities of database management to help you focus on developing applications, Astra DB is not compatible with DataStax Enterprise (DSE) administrative tools, such as nodetool and dsetool.

Use the DataStax Astra Portal to get statistics and view database and health metrics. Astra DB does not support access to the database using the Java Management Extensions (JMX) tools, like JConsole.

Simplified security without compromise

Astra DB provides a secure cloud-based database without dramatically changing the way you currently access your internal database:

  • New user management flows avoid the need for superusers and global keyspace administration in CQL.

  • Endpoints are secured using mutual authentication, either with mutual-TLS or secure tokens issued to the client.

  • TLS provides a secure transport layer you can trust, ensuring that in-flight data is protected.

  • Data at rest is protected by encrypted volumes.

Additionally, Astra DB incorporates role-based access control (RBAC).

See Security guidelines for more information about how Astra DB implements security.

Replication within regions

Each Astra DB database uses replication across three availability zones within the launched region to promote uptime and ensure data integrity.

Classic database limits

The following limits are set for classic databases created using Astra DB. These limits ensure good practices, foster availability, and promote optimal configurations for your database.

Columns

Parameter Limit Notes

Size of values in a single column

5 MB

Hard limit.

Number of columns per table

50

Hard limit.

Tables

Parameter Limit Notes

Number of tables per database

200

A warning is issued when the database exceeds 100 tables.

Table properties

Fixed

All table properties are fixed except for Expiring data with time-to-live.

Secondary index

1

For classic databases, limit is per table.

Materialized view

2

Limit is per table. A warning is issued if the materialized view creates large partitions.

Workloads

Astra DB workloads for Classic databases do not have a rate limit.

Storage-Attached Indexing (SAI) limits

The maximum number of SAI indexes on a table is 10. There can be no more than 50 SAI indexes in a single database.

Automated backup and restore

Classic databases created using Astra DB are automatically backed up every four hours. The latest six backups are stored, providing flexibility in which point in time you can restore to, if necessary.

If the database was terminated, all data is destroyed and is unrecoverable.

If data is accidentally deleted or corrupted, contact DataStax Support within 12 hours to restore data from one of the available backups. This window ensures that the data to restore exists as a saved backup.

When restoring data, DataStax Support allows you to restore data to the same database, replacing the current data with data from the backup. All data added to the database after the backup is no longer available in the database.

Cassandra Query Language (CQL)

At this time, user-defined functions (UDFs) and user-defined aggregate functions (UDAs) are not enabled.
Parameter Limit Notes

Consistency level

Fixed

Supported consistency levels: Reads: Any supported consistency level is permitted.
Single-region writes: LOCAL_QUORUM and LOCAL_SERIAL

Compaction strategy

Fixed

UnifiedCompactionStrategy is a more efficient compaction strategy that combines ideas from STCS (SizeTieredCompactionStrategy), LCS (LeveledCompactionStrategy), and TWCS (TimeWindowCompactionStrategy) along with token range sharding. This all-inclusive compaction strategy works well for all use cases.

Lists

Fixed

Cannot UPDATE or DELETE a list value by index because Astra DB does not allow list operations that perform a read-before-write. Note: INSERT operations work the same way in Astra DB as in Apache Cassandra® and DataStax Enterprise (DSE). Also, UPDATE and DELETE operations that are not by index work the same in Astra DB, Cassandra, and DSE.

Page size

Fixed

The proper page size is configured automatically.

Large partition

Warning

A warning is issued if reading or compacting a partition that exceeds 100 MB.

If you try to use a CQL command with unsupported DDL properties, the command works, but ignores the unsupported values.

For example:

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS library.books
  (
    id UUID PRIMARY KEY,
    lastname text,
    firstname text)
  WITH nodesync={'enabled': 'true'};

The table is created with the defined attributes, except for the nodesync values. The results show a warning that lists the unsupported values, which are ignored:

Warnings :
Ignoring provided values [nodesync] as they are not supported for Table
Properties(ignored values are: [additional_write_policy,
bloom_filter_fp_chance, caching, cdc, compaction, compression,
crc_check_chance, dse_edge_label_property, dse_vertex_label_property,
gc_grace_seconds, id, max_index_interval, memtable,
memtable_flush_period_in_ms, min_index_interval, nodesync, read_repair,
speculative_retry])

CQL commands

In general, any operations concerning keyspaces, materialized views, functions and aggregates are not supported. In addition, search indexes are also not supported.

The following CQL commands are not supported in Astra DB:

  • CREATE KEYSPACE

  • ALTER KEYSPACE

  • DROP KEYSPACE

  • CREATE MATERIALIZED VIEW

  • ALTER MATERIALIZED VIEW

  • DROP MATERIALIZED VIEW

  • CREATE AGGREGATE

  • DESCRIBE AGGREGATE

  • DROP AGGREGATE

  • CREATE FUNCTION

  • DESCRIBE FUNCTION

  • DROP FUNCTION

  • CREATE TRIGGER

  • DROP TRIGGER

  • CREATE ROLE

  • ALTER ROLE

  • DROP ROLE

  • LIST ROLES

  • LIST PERMISSIONS

  • RESTRICT

  • RESTRICT ROWS

  • UNRESTRICT

  • UNRESTRICT ROWS

  • CREATE SEARCH INDEX

  • COMMIT SEARCH INDEX

  • REBUILD SEARCH INDEX

  • RELOAD SEARCH INDEX

  • ALTER SEARCH INDEX SCHEMA

  • ALTER SEARCH INDEX CONFIG

  • DROP SEARCH INDEX CONFIG

For supported CQL commands, see the Astra DB CQL quick reference.

cassandra.yaml

If you are an experienced Cassandra or DataStax Enterprise user, you are likely familiar with editing the cassandra.yaml file. For Astra DB, the cassandra.yaml file cannot be configured.

The following limits are included in Astra DB:

// for read requests
        page_size_failure_threshold_in_kb =  512
        in_select_cartesian_product_failure_threshold =  25
        partition_keys_in_select_failure_threshold = 20
        tombstone_warn_threshold = 1000
        tombstone_failure_threshold = 100000

// for write requests
        batch_size_warn_threshold_in_kb = 5
        batch_size_fail_threshold_in_kb = 50
        unlogged_batch_across_partitions_warn_threshold = 10
        user_timestamps_enabled = true
        column_value_size_failure_threshold_in_kb = 5 * 1024L
        read_before_write_list_operations_enabled = false
        max_mutation_size_in_kb = 16384

// for schema
        fields_per_udt_failure_threshold = 30
        collection_size_warn_threshold_in_kb =  5 * 1024L
        items_per_collection_warn_threshold =  20
        columns_per_table_failure_threshold = 50
        secondary_index_per_table_failure_threshold = 1
        tables_warn_threshold = 100
        tables_failure_threshold = 200

// for node status
        disk_usage_percentage_warn_threshold =  70
        disk_usage_percentage_failure_threshold =  80
        partition_size_warn_threshold_in_mb =  100

// SAI Table Failure threshold
        sai_indexes_per_table_failure_threshold = 10

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