Getting started with DataStax Distribution of Apache Cassandra for Administrators

Information about using DataStax Distribution of Apache Cassandra (DDAC) for Administrators.

This topic provides basic information and a roadmap to documentation for System Administrators new to DataStax Distribution of Apache Cassandra 3.11 (DDAC).

Which product?

DataStax Offerings provides basic information to help you choose which product best fits your requirements.
Note: DataStax offers subscription-based support (Luna) for open-source Cassandra. Learn more.

Learn

Before diving into administration tasks, you can save a lot of time when setting up and operating DDAC in a production environment by learning a few basics first:
  • DDAC is compatible with Apache Cassandra 3.11 and adds production-certified changes to Cassandra.
  • Cassandra-based applications and clusters are much different than relational databases and use a data model based on the types of queries, not on modeling entities and relationships. Architecture in brief contains key concepts and terminology for understanding the database.
  • Save yourself some time and frustration by spending a few moments looking at DataStax Doc and Search tips. These short topics talk about navigation and bookmarking aids that will make your journey through the docs more efficient and productive.

The following are not administrator-specific but are presented to give you a fuller picture of the database:

  • Cassandra Query Language (CQL) is the query language for DDAC.
  • DataStax provides drivers in several programming languages for connecting client applications to the database.

Plan

The Planning and testing guide contains guidelines for capacity planning and hardware selection in production environments. Key topics include:

Install

DataStax offers a variety of ways to start using DDAC:

Secure

DDAC uses the security capabilities present in Apache Cassandra, not DSE Advanced Security. Security features include:

Attention: The DDAC database includes the default role cassandra with password cassandra. This is a superuser login has full access to the database. DataStax recommends only using the cassandra role once during initial authentication configuration to establish your own superuser and then disabling the cassandra role. See Configuring authentication.

Tune

Important topics for optimizing the performance of the database include:

Operations

Load

The primary tools for getting data into and out of the database are:

Monitor

DataStax provides tools to monitor cluster metrics.

Troubleshooting/Help

DataStax provides a wide variety of resources for troubleshooting and other types of help:

Troubleshooting
Help

Upgrade