What are Apache Cassandra™ and DataStax Enterprise (DSE)?
The Apache Cassandra™ database is the right choice when you need scalability and proven fault-tolerance on commodity hardware or cloud infrastructure for mission-critical data. Cassandra’s support for replicating across multiple datacenters is best-in-class, providing lower latency for your users and the peace of mind of knowing that you can survive regional outages.
Cassandra’s data model offers the convenience of column indexes with the performance of log-structured updates, strong support for denormalization and materialized views, and powerful built-in caching.
DataStax Enterprise is a commercial database platform that provides a production-ready version of Cassandra along with additional enterprise database features needed for building modern Internet enterprise applications.
New to DataStax Enterprise and Apache Cassandra™?
Follow the reading path below to get up-to-speed with DataStax Enterprise and Cassandra:
1. At-a-Glance
2. Getting Started
3. The Tools
Developing with Cassandra and DataStax Enterprise
Cassandra’s data model offers the convenience of column indexes with the performance of log-structured updates, strong support for renormalization and materialized views, and powerful build-in caching. As a developer you must be familiar with Cassandra data model and Cassandra query language (CQL). Below are some quick links to get you started:
4. Data Modeling
5. CQL
There are two tools that can help learning the Cassandra Query Language (CQL):
- DevCenter: a free visual query tool for Cassandra developers and administrators
- cqlsh: the CQL shell that is included with Apache Cassandra™
Data modeling training and tutorials
Developing applications
For developing applications, you can use one of the official DataStax C++, C#, Java, Node.js, Python, PHP, or Ruby open source drivers. Each of these drivers comes with a common set of features (synchronous and asynchronous API, configurable load balancing and retry policies, transparent fail-over, etc.) meant to simplify the development of modern always-on online applications.
C++
C#
Java
Node.js
PHP
Python
Ruby
There are also numerous drivers.
DSE Integrated Analytics
DataStax Enterprise supplies built-in capabilities needed to run analytics on Cassandra data. Real-time, batch, and integration with external Hadoop platforms such as those offered by Cloudera and Hortonworks is supported. Learn more in our DSE Analytics docs.
DSE Integrated Search
DataStax Enterprise provides built-in search capabilities powered by Apache Solr. To learn more about using search in your application check out DSE Search docs.
Operations
A quick set of links for the most common operations in Apache Cassandra™ and DSE:
You can read more about DSE management in the DSE Management Services.
DataStax OpsCenter makes it easy to manage DataStax Enterprise clusters by giving administrators, architects and developers an at-a-glance view of the system from a centralized dashboard.
Security
DataStax Enterprise includes advanced data protection for enterprise-grade databases. To learn more see DSE Security .
Advanced Topics
Understanding the architecture of Apache Cassandra™ will help you get a better grasp of how Cassandra works. Additionally, the following links should provide in depth answers to questions about read and write operations, atomicity, consistency, durability, and isolation of operations.