Once you have setup Cassandra on your machine , this is how you ll need to proceed to get started with how Cassandra works .
Assuming you have installed Cassandra to /opt
Starting cassandra : /opt/cassandra/bin/cassandra
Now to get into the command mode:
/opt/cassandra
bin/cassandra-cli --host localhost --port 9160
Creating a keyspace :
<keyspace Name="Prototype">
<columnfamily Name="master" CompareWith="UTF8Type" />
<replicaplacementstrategy>org.apache.cassandra.locator.RackUnawareStrategy</ReplicaPlacementStrategy>
<replicationfactor>1</ReplicationFactor>
<endpointsnitch>org.apache.cassandra.locator.EndPointSnitch</EndPointSnitch>
</Keyspace>
KeySpace - compare it to database (Prorotype)
ColumFamily - compare it with a table (master)
Setting a value :
set Prototype.master['1']['name'] = 'Arun'
set Prototype.master['1']['age'] = '22'
setting value -> keyspace.columnfamily['rowKey']['colum']='value'
Rowkey is like the primary key , For eg: 1 is the primary key here , it will contain all properties of Arun
as different columns name, age etc...
Retrieval of data :
get Prototype.master['1']['name']
=> (column=name, value=Arun, timestamp=1286265373093000)
This will get only the value in the name colum of rowKey 1
get Prototype.master['1']
This will get you all the columns for the rowkey '1'
count Prototype.master['1']
will get the count of columns availble for rowkey '1'
FYI :------------------ Row keys are case sensitive ------------------
count Prototype.master['2']
will give you 0 columns exist , don't worry it will not throw a no column exist error.
But this is not the case for columns :
get Prototype.master['1']['friendlist']
Exception null
column friendlist does not exist , and it throws a exception (------------Something to be careful about--------------------)