Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Using cassandra-cli
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. In-
stead, 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 equival-
ents, but it's merely a resemblance, not a relationship.
In recent versions of Cassandra, cassandra-cli is deprecated and will be removed from Cas-
sandra 3.0. This should serve to underscore the fact that CQL is considered the way to in-
teract 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 direct-
ory 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.
