#2 Setting up the database

Let’s set up the database now. As I mentioned in the first post, we will use CassandraDB.

I followed the steps for the installation from the official documentation site. I don’t want to deal with docker at the moment therefore I installed the Tarball binary file.

After extracting the .tar.gz file we can cd into it and start the database.

$ cd apache-cassandra-4.1.4/ && bin/cassandra

Let’s connect to the database using cqlsh. It is a command-line interface for interacting with Cassandra.

$ bin/cqlsh

Now, we can create a keyspace for our project by typing the following query.

CREATE KEYSPACE channels_db WITH replication = {'class': 'SimpleStrategy', 'replication_factor': '1'}

Here we are creating a keyspace named “channels_db”. A keyspace in Cassandra is akin to a database in traditional relational database systems.

• In the replication map, 'class' is a key that specifies the replication strategy class.
• In this case, the replication strategy chosen is 'SimpleStrategy'. SimpleStrategy is a basic replication strategy that is suitable for single data centers or development environments. It distributes replicas of data evenly across the cluster nodes.
• 'replication_factor' is another key within the replication map. It specifies the number of replicas (copies) of data to be maintained for fault tolerance.
• In this query, the replication factor is set to '1', meaning that only one replica of each piece of data will be maintained. While this is fine for development it doesn’t provide fault tolerance in a production environment. Production systems typically use a replication factor greater than one to ensure data durability and availability

After creating keyspace we can type use channels_db command to connect to our database.

Let’s create a user table inside the database with the following query.

CREATE TABLE users (
    user_id uuid PRIMARY KEY,
    bio text,
    created_at timestamp,
    email text,
    password text,
    username text
)

We can display all the tables in database with DESCRIBE tables query.

Now, that we have a database ready. We can connect to it from our HTTP Server.