Getting started with DataStax Enterprise 5.1
This topic provides basic information and a roadmap to documentation for System Administrators new to DataStax Enterprise (DSE).
Learn
Before diving into administration tasks, you can save a lot of time when setting up and operating DataStax Enterprise (DSE) in a production environment by learning a few basics first:
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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.
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You can use DSE OpsCenter and Lifecycle Manager for most administrative tasks.
The following are not administrator-specific but are presented to give you a fuller picture of the database:
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Cassandra Query Language (CQL) is the query language for DSE.
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DataStax-compatible drivers are available in several programming languages to connect client applications to the database.
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APIs are available for OpsCenter, DseGraphFrame, Apache Cassandra® Spark connector, and the DataStax-compatible drivers.
Plan
The Capacity planning and hardware selection for DataStax Enterprise implementations contains guidelines for capacity planning and hardware selection in production environments.
Install
DataStax offers a variety of ways to set up a cluster:
- Cloud
- On premises
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For help with choosing an install type, see Which install method should I use?
Secure
DSE Advanced Security provides fine-grained user and access controls to keep applications data protected and compliant with regulatory standards like PCI, SOX, HIPAA, and the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Key topics include creating role, LDAP authentication, and configuring database permissions.
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The DSE 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 Creating superuser accounts. |
Tune
Important topics for optimizing the performance of the database include:
Operations
The most commonly used operations include:
Load
The primary tools for getting data into and out of the database are:
For other methods, see Migrate to DataStax Enterprise.
Monitor
DataStax provides the following tools to monitor clusters and view metrics:
