Introduction to Cassandra Shell on Azure Cosmos DB

     I have covered the MongoDB Shell couple weeks ago and wrote about how to use it directly in Azure Portal. Cosmos DB Team announced the Cassandra Shell for its Cassandra API. You can use Cassandra Shell to run CQL commands that supported by Azure Cosmos DB Apache API.

     You can find the Cassandra Shell in the Data Explorer tab. Click in Open Cassandra Shell and click on Complete Setup button. You need to do that once.

     When it's completed, Cassandra Shell should open and ready to accept commands. I said that for MongoDB, and I will say it for Cassandra Shell too, Fonts are small, and it is not user friendly if you have vision problems. By default, Cassandra Shell knows all the connection strings, it connects to the current Cassandra API so you don't need to worry about passing connection strings to connect it.

     In the following screenshot, I create a new db named awesomeks and a table named Orders by using the Cassandra Shell. Then I inserted a row into the table.

     Let's see how this looks like at Data Explorer.

     Azure Cosmos DB supports the following Cassandra Query Commands. For the CREATE KEYSPACE command, Cosmos DB ignores the replication settings since Cosmos DB handles replication differently.

• CREATE KEYSPACE 
• CREATE TABLE
• CREATE INDEX
• ALLOW FILTERING
• ALTER TABLE
• USE
• INSERT
• SELECT
• UPDATE
• BATCH
• DELETE