Book Image

Learning Apache Cassandra - Second Edition

Book Image

Learning Apache Cassandra - Second Edition

Overview of this book

Cassandra is a distributed database that stands out thanks to its robust feature set and intuitive interface, while providing high availability and scalability of a distributed data store. This book will introduce you to the rich feature set offered by Cassandra, and empower you to create and manage a highly scalable, performant and fault-tolerant database layer. The book starts by explaining the new features implemented in Cassandra 3.x and get you set up with Cassandra. Then you’ll walk through data modeling in Cassandra and the rich feature set available to design a flexible schema. Next you’ll learn to create tables with composite partition keys, collections and user-defined types and get to know different methods to avoid denormalization of data. You will then proceed to create user-defined functions and aggregates in Cassandra. Then, you will set up a multi node cluster and see how the dynamics of Cassandra change with it. Finally, you will implement some application-level optimizations using a Java client. By the end of this book, you'll be fully equipped to build powerful, scalable Cassandra database layers for your applications.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)

Viewing a keyspace schema


Suppose we lost a local copy of the schema we created and wish to retrieve the schema from Cassandra. In such situations, we can use the cqlsh functions to fetch the keyspace schema as well as the schema of any particular table. To get a list of keyspaces that were created on the local node within Cassandra, we can simply run the following statement:

DESCRIBE KEYSPACES;

This will return the list of keyspaces. This also contains several system keyspaces, which are used by Cassandra for internal purposes. As we can see, this will also contain the my_status keyspace we created:

To view the schema of a particular keyspace, you can run either of the following statements:

DESCRIBE KEYSPACE "my_status";

You could also use the following:

DESCRIBE "my_status";

Both of these commands will return the keyspace schema followed by the schemas of all the tables that are present within the keyspace schema: