To explore the Thrift API, we'll use a new tool called cassandra-cli. Like cqlsh, cassandra-cli is a command-line interface to Cassandra, but it does not provide a CQL interface. Instead, cassandra-cli uses a small, purpose-built query language that allows us to interact directly with column families. Some cassandra-cli commands resemble their CQL equivalents, but it's merely a resemblance, not a relationship.

In recent versions of Cassandra, cassandra-cli is deprecated and will be removed from Cassandra 3.0. This should serve to underscore the fact that CQL is considered the way to interact with Cassandra: the Thrift interface is merely a curiosity, not a viable tool to interact with Cassandra in our applications.

Your installation of Cassandra should have the cassandra-cli executable in the same directory as cqlsh. Once we start it up, we should see something like this:

Just as in cqlsh, we'll need to start by specifying the keyspace we want to interact with:

USE my_status;

Now that we've got cassandra-cli up and running, we can start exploring how our CQL3 tables are modeled at the column family level.