Most of us have heard about Apache Cassandra, it is an open sourced distributed NoSQL Database which is used by large corporations like Facebook, Uber, etc

I will be explaining how to create a container with cassandra and connect into it to execute the Cassandra Query Language(CQL) statements.

Cassandra offers various advantages like:

• Scalability
• Maximum Fault Tolerance across NoSQL databases
• Multi Data-Center support and Hybrid Cloud support

In this tutorial, I will be explaining how to create an instance on Docker and execute basic cqlsh commands

Basically, all docker containers can be established with a yaml, the compose file for this is

version: '3.9'

services:
  db:
    container_name: cassandra-dev
    image: cassandra
    ports:
      - 9042:9042
    environment:
      CASSANDRA_USE_ASTRA: "false" 
      CASSANDRA_USER: "cassandra" 
      CASSANDRA_PASSWORD: "cassandra" 
      CASSANDRA_LOCAL_DC: "datacenter1" 
      CASSANDRA_CONTACT_POINTS: "db:9042"
      CASSANDRA_KEYSPACE_CQL: "CREATE KEYSPACE test_keyspace WITH REPLICATION = {'class':'SimpleStrategy','replication_factor':1};" 
      MONITORING_PROMETHEUS: "false"
      MONITORING_GRAFANA: "false"
      DISTRIBUTED_TRACING_ENABLED: "false"

Once you've created this yaml, open your CLI and run the following command, I have explained what it does down below

docker-compose up -d

In a nutshell, this yaml tells docker to spin up a container with the following details

• Pull up the Cassandra Image
• Spin it up on the container named “Cassandra-local”
• Expose it on ports 9042
• Create a Cassandra user with the following parameters
• username: Cassandra, password: Cassandra
• Create a keyspace (similar to database if you’re from a SQL background) , called test_keyspace To access the database/keyspace you can access the shell by using the following command

>docker exec -it cassandra-dev /bin/bash
>cqlsh

To create a keyspace use the following commands:

    CREATE KEYSPACE test_keyspace_2;
    USE test_keyspace_2;
    CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS test_table(
      id         uuid,
      first_name text,
      last_name  text,
      address    text,
      city       text,
      telephone  text,
      PRIMARY KEY ((id))
    );

You can consider using the DDL and DML commands from the docs here

The connection to docker has been successful and now you can connect it to learn CQL.