Getting started with DataStax Enterprise 6.0

Information about using DataStax Enterprise for Administrators.

This topic provides basic information and a roadmap to documentation for System Administrators new to DataStax Enterprise.

Which product?

DataStax Offerings provides basic information to help you choose which product best fits your requirements.

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:

DataStax Enterprise-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. contains key concepts and terminology for understanding the database.
You can use DSE OpsCenter and Lifecycle Manager for most administrative tasks.
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 DataStax Enterprise.
DataStax provides drivers in several programming languages for connecting client applications to the database.
APIs are available for OpsCenter, DseGraphFrame, DataStax Spark Cassandra Connector, and the drivers.

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 set up a cluster:

Cloud

On premises

Installing and deploying DSE using Lifecycle Manager
Packages for Yum- and Debian-based platforms
Docker images
Binary tarball
Deployment per workload type

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:

Create database users and roles
Set up and configure LDAP access
Configure database permissions

Attention: 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 Role Based Access Control (RBAC) set up to establish your own root account and then disabling the cassandra role. See .