Apache Cassandra is a free and open-source NoSQL database management system that is designed to handle large amounts of data with no single point of failure. In this post, I’m going to highlight 3 different tools that make life easier when using Apache Cassandra.
The first tool I’m going to talk about is called Cassandra SSTable Tools. It is an open source projects that makes life working with SSTables faster and easier. It has 5 main commands associated with it:
- ic-summary – This command provides you with a summary of all the information on each column family. i.e. how much of the data is repaired.
- ic-sstables – This command prints out all the metadata for each sstable that belongs to a specific column family.
- ic-pstats – This command provides you with partition size statistics for a specific column family.
- ic-cfstats – This command provides you statistics about cells in a specific column family.
- ic-purge – This command provides you statistics about reclaimable data for each column family
Normally, tasks like these could take up to several hours of manual work depending on the size of data you are working with but thankfully a toolkit such as this exists.
The second tool I’m going to talk about is called RESTBase. It is a storage proxy and backs up many of these entry points with storage. The default table storage backend is based on Apache Cassandra, which helps it to perform well at large scale platforms without placing undue burden on operations. As a proxy, RESTBase does not perform any significant content processing itself. Instead, it requests content transformations from backend services when needed, and then stores it back for later retrieval.
The last tool that I’m going to talk about is called CQL-VIM. This tool highlights your Cassandra Query Language syntax inside your local vim editor. Personally, VIM can be a huge pain to deal with and I’m sure many of you out there can attest to that. That being said, this tool makes it easier for us to identify between functions, objects, variables and so on. Compared to the other tools in this post, this does not revolutionize any of the existing operations that Cassandra developers and architects deal with but it does make programming more efficient.
We recently launched Cassandra.Link which is a knowledge base that our team created to act as a central POI for all things Apache Cassandra. Our goal with Cassandra.Link was to not only fill the gap of Planet Cassandra but we want to bring the Cassandra community, no matter what variant they use, together. Feel free to reach out if you wish to collaborate with us on this project in any capacity. Lastly, RESTBase also systematically emits statsd metrics about storage and backend requests, such as metric production, to track performance and errors in a micro-service architecture. This is a very neat and compact toolkit to revamp your backend DevOps.
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