Get started with DataStax Enterprise 6.8
This topic provides basic information and a roadmap to documentation for system administrators new to DSE.
Which product?
To help you choose which DataStax products best fit your requirements, see Products on the DataStax website. DataStax Enterprise (DSE) provides all the capabilities of Apache Cassandra® plus advanced functionality (detailed below).
Learn
Before diving into administration tasks, you can save a lot of time when setting up and operating DSE in a production environment by learning a few basics first:
- Differences between Cassandra, DSE, and relational databases
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Cassandra and DSE databases are much different than relational databases and use a data model based on the types of queries, not on modeling entities and relationships. DataStax highly recommends that you read our Architecture in brief. It contains key concepts and terminology for understanding the database.
- DSE OpsCenter and Lifecycle Manager
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DSE OpsCenter and Lifecycle Manager automate and simplify many administrative tasks.
- Learning resources
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DataStax sample code and examples- Help for getting things done faster.
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Learn menu - Available on every page where you can quickly access other resources such as blogs and DataStax Academy.
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While not specific to administrators, these topics provide more database details:
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Cassandra Query Language (CQL) is the query language for DSE.
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DataStax supports drivers in several programming languages to connect client applications to the database.
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APIs are available to interface with OpsCenter, DseGraphFrame, Apache Cassandra® Spark connector, and the DataStax-compatible 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
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Use OpsCenter Lifecycle Manager to provision and deploy a DSE cluster
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Deployment per workload type For help with choosing an install type, see Choose an installation method.
Secure
DSE Advanced Security provides detailed user 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:
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The DSE database includes the default role <cassandra> with password <cassandra>.
This is a superuser login with full access to the database.
DataStax recommends using the |
Tune
Important topics for optimizing the performance of the database include:
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Enable the Nodesync service, which covers continuous background repair.
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Load test your cluster before deployment.
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 Migrating data to DSE.
Monitor
DataStax provides the following tools to monitor clusters and view metrics:
Troubleshooting/Help
DataStax provides a wide variety of resources for troubleshooting and other types of help:
Upgrade your database
Key topics in the Upgrade Guide include:
Advanced functionality
In addition to all the capabilities of Cassandra, DSE offers the following capabilities:
- DSE Analytics
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Built on a production-certified version of Apache Spark™, with enhanced capabilities like AlwaysOn SQL for process streaming and historical data at cloud scale.
- DSE Graph
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DSE Graph is optimized for storing billions of items and their relationships. This enables you to identify and analyze hidden relationships between connected data and build powerful modern applications for real-time use cases: fraud detection, customer 360, social networks, IoT, and recommendation systems. The DSE Graph Quick Start is a great place to get started.
- DSE Search
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Provides powerful search and indexing capabilities, including support for full-text, relevancy, sub-string, and fuzzy queries over large data sets, aggregation, and geospatial matchups.
- DSE OpsCenter
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Provides visual management and monitoring for DSE, including automatic backups, reduced manual operations, automatic failover, patch release upgrades, and secure management of DSE clusters on-premises, in the cloud, or in hybrid environments that span multiple data centers.
- Lifecycle Manager
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A visual provisioning and monitoring tool for DSE clusters. LCM allows you to define the cluster configuration including datacenter, node topology, and security. LCM monitoring helps you troubleshoot installation, configuration, and upgrade jobs.
- DSE Advanced Security
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Provides fine-grained user and access controls to keep applications data protected and compliance with regulatory standards like PCI, SOX, HIPAA, and the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
- DSE Metrics Collector
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Aggregates DSE metrics and integrates with existing monitoring solutions to facilitate problem resolution and remediation.
- DSE Management Services
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DSE Management Services automatically handle administration and maintenance tasks and assist with overall database cluster management.
- NodeSync service
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Continuous background repair that virtually eliminates manual efforts to run repair operations in a DataStax cluster.
- Advanced Replication
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Advanced Replication allows a single cluster to have a primary hub with multiple spokes. This allows configurable, bi-directional distributed data replication to and from source and destination clusters.
