Get started with Astra Managed Clusters
Register for an Astra account, and then create Astra Managed Clusters databases that are optimized for real-time applications that require large data volume, low latency, and flexible data models.
Create a database
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In the Astra Portal, click Create database.
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Click Managed clusters.
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Enter a meaningful, human-readable database name.
You cannot change the database name after you create the database.
Database names must follow these rules:
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Must start and end with a letter or number
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Can contain letters, numbers, and the special characters
& + - _ ( ) < > . , @ -
Cannot exceed 50 characters
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Enter a name for the database’s first keyspace.
Keyspace names must follow these rules:
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Must start with a letter or number
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Can contain letters, numbers, and underscores
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Cannot exceed 48 characters.
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Cannot be the reserved words
dseorsystem -
Must be unique within the database
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Select a cloud provider and region to host your database.
To minimize latency in production databases, select a region that is close to your application’s users.
For multi-region availability, you can add more regions after you create the database.
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Select a Workload Type and Workload Size for this database. For more information, see Workload capacity tiers.
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Click Create database.
Wait for your database to initialize and reach Active status. This can take several minutes.
Get an application token
You use application tokens to connect to your database.
In the Astra Portal, there are several ways you can generate an application token scoped to a database.
When you sign in to the Astra Portal, click Managed clusters, find your Astra Managed Clusters database, click More, and then select Generate Token. This option generates a token scoped to the selected database.
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Download and securely store your token. The token is shown only once. |
For more information, see Manage application tokens.
Connect to your database
To get started with Astra Managed Clusters, use the Astra Portal Data Loader to load a CSV file or pre-existing sample data. For bulk writes of large CSV files, use DataStax Bulk Loader (DSBulk).
Then, explore other connection methods to read data, write data, and perform administrative operations on your databases.
Use CQL and Cassandra drivers
Because Astra DB is based on Apache Cassandra®, you can use Cassandra drivers to connect to your Astra Managed Clusters databases, and then run Cassandra Query Language (CQL) statements against the tables in your databases.
The following Cassandra drivers are compatible with Astra Managed Clusters databases:
| Language | Driver | Version | Documentation |
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C++ |
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C# |
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Go |
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Java |
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Node.js |
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Python |
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Scala |
Connect to Astra Managed Clusters with the Apache Cassandra Spark Connector |
To use a driver, you need to add the driver dependency to your project, initialize a driver session, and then connect the driver to your database. Once connected, your scripts can execute CQL statements against your database through the driver instance. For general information about developing applications with Cassandra drivers, see DataStax-compatible Cassandra drivers.
