Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter2.Installing Cassandra
For those among us who like instant gratification, we'll start by installing Cassandra. Because
Cassandra introduces a lot of new vocabulary, there might be some unfamiliar terms as we walk
through this. That's OK; the idea here is to get set up quickly in a simple configuration to make
sure everything is running properly. This will serve as an orientation. Then, we'll take a step back
and understand Cassandra in its larger context.
Installing the Binary
Cassandra is available for download from the Web at
http://cassandra.apache.org
.
Just click the
link on the home page to download the latest release version as a gzipped tarball. The prebuilt
binary is named apache-cassandra-x.x.x-bin.tar.gz, where x.x.xrepresents the version number.
The download is around 10MB.
Extracting the Download
The simplest way to get started is to download the prebuilt binary. You can unpack the com-
pressed file using any regular ZIP utility. On Linux, GZip extraction utilities should be prein-
stalled; on Windows, you'll need to get a program such as WinZip, which is commercial, or
something like 7-Zip, which is freeware. You can download the freeware program 7-Zip from
Open your extracting program. You might have to extract the ZIP file and the TAR file in separ-
ate steps. Once you have a folder on your filesystem called apache-cassandra-x.x.x, you're ready
to run Cassandra.
What's In There?
Once you decompress the tarball, you'll see that the Cassandra binary distribution includes sev-
eral directories. Let's take a moment to look around and see what we have.
biin
This directory contains the executables to run Cassandra and the command-line interface
(CLI) client. It also has scripts to run the
nodetool
, which is a utility for inspecting a cluster
to determine whether it is properly configured, and to perform a variety of maintenance op-
erations. We look at
nodetool
in depth later. It also has scripts for converting SSTables (the
datafiles) to JSON and back.
