In Apache Cassandra Lunch #66, we will discuss the DBeaver Enterprise and demonstrate how it can be used with a Cassandra Database. The live recording of Cassandra Lunch, which includes a more in-depth discussion and a demo, is embedded below in case you were not able to attend live. If you would like to attend Apache Cassandra Lunch live, it is hosted every Wednesday at 12 PM EST. Register here now!
DBeaver Enterprise
DBeaver is a GUI tool for connecting to and administering database servers. This blog post covers the enterprise version. DBeaver can connect to virtually all SQL databases, but the paid enterprise version is required to connect with NoSQL databases out of the box; however, with custom drivers, DBeaver can be configured to work with NoSQL databases. We covered what DBeaver is and the features included in the community version in this blog post.
DBeaver Enterprise Features
As mentioned before, we covered the majority of features in the previous blog post detailing the community edition. DBeaver enterprise provides extensions for NoSQL databases such as Cassandra, MongoDB, Couchbase, Amazon DynamoDB, and Google Big Table. That is just to name a few. As with SQL databases, DBeaver will support all native data types and has an SQL interface to run your queries when testing your database. In addition to this, DBeaver makes exploring the structure and schema easy.
Some additional features that come with DBeaver Enterprise include, a mock-data generator for basic and advanced data types. Some of the data types available:
- Numbers
- Random Strings
- Names
- Addresses
- Credit Cards
- Domains & IP Addresses
- Custom Regular Expressions
- Flexible Numeric Generators
- And more…
In addition to the features mentioned above, users of the enterprise edition have the ability to submit tickets to online support with tracking.
The GUI
Below is an image of the DBeaver Enterprise GUI displaying SQL databases alongside a Cassandra instance. As you can see it is easy to visualize keyspaces, tables, columns, etc on the left-hand side of the screen. We have an example of using the SQL scripting system, although technically this is CQL being executed.
The biggest advantage of using DBeaver as a tool, in my opinion, is the ability to switch between multiple databases of different types. The ability to view and evaluate multiple database schemas and visualize the data within is very advantageous in a development environment.
Demo
DBeaver Enterprise makes it exceptionally easy to connect to a Cassandra instance. In the demo, I spun up an instance of Cassandra in Docker.
To start, in the CLI (I was using windows PowerShell) I ran the following commands to start the Cassandra instance.
docker pull cassandra:latest
docker run -p 9042:9042 --rm --name dbeaver-cassandra -d cassandra
After allowing time for the Cassandra instance to get started, navigate to the DBeaver Enterprise GUI and click the add connection button, pictured. Select Cassandra – the default port is set to 9042, so if you chose to expose Cassandra on a different port you will have to specify that here. I used the default user created with the name and password Cassandra and click the “Finish” button. It’s as easy as that to connect your Cassandra instance to DBeaver enterprise.
Resources
Cassandra.Link
Cassandra.Link is a knowledge base that we created for all things Apache Cassandra. Our goal with Cassandra.Link was to not only fill the gap of Planet Cassandra but to bring the Cassandra community together. Feel free to reach out if you wish to collaborate with us on this project in any capacity.
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