Cassandra GUI 2.0 - Making things a little bit easier

Update (2014 October 31st)

You can download WSO2 Storage server  1.1.0 which ships Cassandra explorer and many interesting tools to manage storages. Please follow the following links for documentation to use Cassandra Explorer.

Download the product
https://docs.wso2.com/display/SS110/Downloading+the+Product

Extract the binary and run the product. (See "Starting the server" after extracting )
https://docs.wso2.com/display/SS110/Running+the+Product

Documentation about Explorer
https://docs.wso2.com/display/SS110/Explore+Cassandra+Cluster

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Cassandra GUI evolved from its first version and new version includes bug fixes and enhanced features.

New features.

• Complete pagination for Row view of explorer
• Search rows by their names. (Filtered on the fly as you type.)
• Filtering non displayable data and label them with warnings.

Bug Fixes

• Remote connection problem
• Connect to Remote Cassandra server without restarting the server.

Start the Server

You can download the server here.

Extract the downloaded product and lets refer extracted folder as CARBON_HOME.

go to CARBON_HOME/bin and run sh wso2server.sh (linux) or
wso2server.bat

Log in to the admin console using https://localhost:9443/

default user name and password : admin, admin

Following screen shots include a quick flow on how it works.

1) Click connect to cluster on right hand side panel. Give connection URL and credentials (if there is any) to connect.

eg: URL = localhost:9160,  or  10.100.3.234:

2) After a Successful connection you will be directed to keyspace listing page. Which will include Keyspaces and clickable column family names. Click on a Column Family to Explore data.

3) Row view Page.

After clicking the column family you have landed in the row view page. It includes rows of your column family and a slice of column data as a summary.

You can search, paginate or change no of items to filter your data. Click "view more" to explore a single row.

4) Column family view page will list all the columns in a single row. You can filter the data with column name,value or time stamp. full numbered pagination is available. 

Big Data : A Quick introduction

What is Big data?

This is one of the buzz words in today's world and has gained the attention of many industries. By looking at the name one might think it as data in "BIG" format. But there is much more than that. Today the rate of data generation is so huge and there are several dimensions that data evolves.

Big data spans three dimensions: Volume, Velocity and Variety.

"
Volume – Big data comes in one size: large. Enterprises are awash with data, easily amassing terabytes and even petabytes of information.

Velocity – Often time-sensitive, big data must be used as it is streaming in to the enterprise in order to maximize its value to the business.

Variety – Big data extends beyond structured data, including unstructured data of all varieties: text, audio, video, click streams, log files and more."

[1]

The most interesting challenge as well as the opportunity comes for companies who deals with Big data. You cannot rely on conventional method to store, load and analyse big data. If the companies do not carefully model their big data problems using all 3 mentioned dimensions the friction they will have in the future to growth will be significant. It is no doubt that huge reinvestment will be needed to re design the whole system to meet the requirements.

Here are some articles which discuss about those issues in big data [2] [3]

[1] http://www-01.ibm.com/software/data/bigdata/

[2] http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1731916

[3] http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/bi/231900914