LAB3_Astra

🎓 LAB3 - Saas Apache Cassandra™ with ASTRA DB

✅ STEP 1: Register to Astra DB Service

ASTRA DB service is available at url https://astra.datastax.com. ASTRA DB is the simplest way to run Cassandra with zero operations at all - just push the button and get your cluster. Astra DB offers 5 Gb Tier Free Forever and you don't need a credit card or anything to sign-up and use it.

Register (if needed) and Sign In to Astra : You can use your Github, Google accounts or register with an email. Make sure to chose a password with minimum 8 characters, containing upper and lowercase letters, at least one number and special character

✅ STEP 2: Create your instance

Fill the creation form using the provided values

Property	Values
Plan	Pick free plan (AND NOT SERVERLESS, as of today it is still in beta version)
Cloud provider	Pick `Google Cloud` - GCP is the only one available in free tier for price reasons. Note that with paid Db you can use any cloud providers and you can also do VPC peering with them.
Select the region	This is the region where your database will reside physically (choose one close to you or your users). For people in EMEA please use `europe-west1` idea here is to reduce latency.

On screen 2 you will provide keys to setup your DB

Property	Value
Database Name	Use the name you like, it is not part of the connection URL. We chose `freetierDb`
Keyspace Name	`pulsar` to make things simple in settings
Database User Name	`astraUser`
Database User password	`astraPassword1`, note that a password must have a number and a minimum of 8 characters

Database creation will be pending for a minute or two with the orange dot and the status Pending

You know the Db is ready when the dot is green and the status switches to Active. You can then click CONNECT.

Select the SUMMARY tab to visualise all metadata of your Astra DB, Cassandra, instance.

✅ STEP 3: Create a table

Select the CQLConsole tab to see the cqlsh command line interface (cli). You might notice that there is no need to provide credentials, it is handled automatically for use and this is the reason why the user name is token

Enter the command describe keyspaces to see a list of available keyspaces. You find the one we created pulsar and system ones.

describe keyspaces;

Select the pulsar keyspace with the Cassandra Query Language (CQL) USE instruction. It will useful to avoid us always providing the keyspace name as a prefix in our commands.

use pulsar;

We are now ready to create a table that matches the fields of our JSON. We will call this table products

CREATE TABLE pulsar.products (
    id text PRIMARY KEY,
    description text
);

This is what your console should look like

To list values in the table we will use the following CQL Statement

SELECT id,description FROM pulsar.products;

This is what your console should look like

✅ STEP 4: Download the cloud secure bundle

Alright, your database is set and ready to receive messages from Pulsar, but we need to download credentials locally to do so.

To connect to ASTRA DB there are multiple ways: Drivers, Rest API, Document API, GraphQl QPI, Dataloader, Spark Connector...etc. The Pulsar component leverages the Cassandra Java Drivers (pulsar is written in JAVA) and as such we need the secure bundle.