About your Astra DB database
Welcome! Let’s cover some basics and review how you can get connected.
Your paid database starts the following specifications:
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A single region
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A single keyspace
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Storage based on your selected plan
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Capacity for up to 200 tables
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Replication factor of three to provide optimal uptime and data integrity
To better understand your database capabilities, review the Astra DB database guardrails and limits.
Astra DB plan options
DataStax Astra DB offers a serverless database, which is an elastic cloud-native database that scales with your workload. You can scale your compute and storage capabilities independently, allowing you to focus on developing your application and less on your infrastructure costs.
Astra DB offers three plans: Free, Pay As You Go, and Enterprise (annual commitment). Each plan is billed according to the Astra DB pricing, which is based on the Read and Write requests, data storage, and data transfer. For more, see DataStax Astra DB Pricing.
Limitations
Serverless databases do not support materialized views or VPC peering. Serverless does offer private endpoints. For additional guardrails and limits, see Guardrails and limits.
Database regions
When creating a database, select a region for your database. Choose a region that is geographically close to your users to optimize performance.
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If you are adding multiple regions to your database, you can use each region only once. You cannot add the same region to the same database more than one time. |
Serverless database regions
Google Cloud
| Region | Location | Pricing |
|---|---|---|
us-east1 |
Moncks Corner, South Carolina, US |
Standard |
us-east4 |
Ashburn, Virginia, US |
Standard |
us-west1 |
The Dalles, Oregon, US |
Standard |
us-central1 |
Council Bluffs, Iowa, US |
Standard |
northamerica-northeast1 |
Montréal, Québec, Canada |
Standard |
us-west4 |
Las Vegas, Nevada, US |
Standard |
europe-west1 |
Saint-Ghislain, Belgium |
Standard |
europe-west2 |
London, England |
Premium |
asia-south1 |
Mumbai, India |
Standard |
australia-southeast1 |
Sydney, Australia |
Premium |
AWS
| Region | Location | Pricing |
|---|---|---|
us-east-1 |
Northern Virginia, US |
Standard |
us-west-2 |
Oregon, US |
Standard |
us-east-2 |
Ohio, US |
Standard |
eu-central-1 |
Frankfurt, Germany |
Standard |
eu-west-1 |
Ireland |
Standard |
ap-south-1 |
Mumbai, India |
Standard |
ap-southeast-1 |
Singapore |
Standard |
ap-southeast-2 |
Sydney, Australia |
Premium |
ap-east-1 |
Hong Kong |
Premium |
sa-east-1 |
São Paulo, Brazil |
Premium Plus |
Azure
| Region | Location | Pricing |
|---|---|---|
westeurope |
Netherlands |
Premium |
francecentral |
Paris, France |
Standard |
westus2 |
Washington (state), US |
Premium |
eastus2 |
Washington, DC, US |
Standard |
canadacentral |
Toronto, Ontario, Canada |
Standard |
eastus |
Virginia US |
Standard |
australiaeast |
New South Wales (Australia) |
Premium |
centralindia |
Central India (Pune) |
Standard |
How do you want to connect?
| Options | Description |
|---|---|
I don’t want to create or manage a schema. Just let me get started. |
Use schemaless JSON Documents with the Document API. |
I want to start using my database now with APIs. |
Use the REST API or GraphQL API to begin interacting with your database and self manage the schema. |
I have an application and want to use the DataStax drivers. |
Initialize one of the DataStax drivers to manage database connections for your application. |
I know CQL and want to connect quickly to use my database. |
Use the integrated CQL shell or the standalone CQLSH tool to interact with your database using CQL. |
Astra DB database guardrails and limits
DataStax Astra DB includes guardrails and sets limits to ensure good practices, foster availability, and promote optimal configurations for your databases.
Astra DB offers a $25.00 free credit per month, allowing you to create an Astra DB database for free. Create a database with just a few clicks and start developing within minutes.
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Each plan includes a $25.00 free credit per month. The $25 credit is good for approximately 30 million reads, 5 million writes, and 40GB of storage per month on a serverless database. |
Limited access to administrative tools
Because Astra DB hides the complexities of database management to help you focus on developing applications, Astra DB is not compatible with DataStax Enterprise (DSE) administrative tools, such as nodetool and dsetool.
Use the DataStax Astra Portal to get statistics and view database and health metrics. Astra DB does not support access to the database using the Java Management Extensions (JMX) tools, like JConsole.
Simplified security without compromise
Astra DB provides a secure cloud-based database without dramatically changing the way you currently access your internal database:
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New user management flows avoid the need for superusers and global keyspace administration in CQL.
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Endpoints are secured using mutual authentication, either with mutual-TLS or secure tokens issued to the client.
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TLS provides a secure transport layer you can trust, ensuring that in-flight data is protected.
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Data at rest is protected by encrypted volumes.
Additionally, Astra DB incorporates role-based access control (RBAC).
See Security guidelines for more information about how Astra DB implements security.
Replication within regions
Each Astra DB database uses replication across three availability zones within the launched region to promote uptime and ensure data integrity.
Serverless database limits
The following limits are set for serverless databases created using Astra DB. These limits ensure good practices, foster availability, and promote optimal configurations for your database.
Databases
Every organization starts with a maximum limit of five databases. To increase this limit or to completely remove it, you must first upgrade your account to PAYG or higher, and then submit a request to contact DataStax Support.
Columns
| Parameter | Limit | Notes |
|---|---|---|
Size of values in a single column |
10 MB |
Hard limit. |
Number of columns per table |
75 |
Hard limit. |
Tables
| Parameter | Limit | Notes |
|---|---|---|
Number of tables per database |
200 |
A warning is issued when the database exceeds 100 tables. |
Table properties |
Fixed |
All table properties are fixed except for Expiring data with time-to-live. |
Secondary indexes and materialized views are not available for serverless databases.
Workloads
Rate limiting is not the same as WRU or RRU. Units are counted based on the input/output of the operation. Astra workloads are limited to 4096 ops/sec by default, which literally means 4096 operations (reads or writes). Batches count as a single operation, regardless of the number of operations in the batch. If you see a "Rate limit reached" error in your application and want your limit raised, open a support ticket.
Storage-Attached Indexing (SAI) limits
The maximum number of SAI indexes on a table is 10. There can be no more than 50 SAI indexes in a single database.
Automated backup and restore
Serverless databases created using Astra DB are automatically backed up once an hour. The hourly backups are stored for 20 days and only include sstables. This backup could exclude data written that is in the memtable and the commit log, but has not been flushed to the sstables.
The commit logs are not included in the hourly backups. Data in memtables that are not yet flushed to sstables is in the commit logs and not available in the hourly backups.
For databases with multiple datacenters in various regions, backup management is only available for the original datacenter selected when you created the database. Restoring from backup removes all other datacenters, restoring to the primary datacenter, and adding the other datacenters with a restored version of the primary datacenter.
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If the database was terminated, all data is destroyed and is unrecoverable. |
If data is accidentally deleted or corrupted, contact DataStax Support to restore data from one of the available backups. This window ensures that the data to restore exists as a saved backup.
When restoring data, DataStax Support allows you to restore data to the same database, replacing the current data with data from the backup. All data added to the database after the backup is no longer available in the database.
When restoring data, DataStax Support allows you to restore data on the same cluster if the table is dropped, and data is restored in the same cluster using the specified backup.
Cassandra Query Language (CQL)
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At this time, user-defined functions (UDFs) and user-defined aggregate functions (UDAs) are not enabled. |
| Parameter | Limit | Notes |
|---|---|---|
Consistency level |
Fixed |
Supported consistency levels:
Reads: Any supported consistency level is permitted.
Multi-region writes:
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Compaction strategy |
Fixed |
UnifiedCompactionStrategy is a more efficient compaction strategy that combines ideas from STCS (SizeTieredCompactionStrategy), LCS (LeveledCompactionStrategy), and TWCS (TimeWindowCompactionStrategy) along with token range sharding. This all-inclusive compaction strategy works well for all use cases. |
Lists |
Fixed |
Cannot |
Page size |
Fixed |
The proper page size is configured automatically. |
Large partition |
Warning |
A warning is issued if reading or compacting a partition that exceeds 100 MB. |
CQL commands
The following CQL commands are not supported in Astra DB:
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ALTER KEYSPACE
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ALTER SEARCH INDEX CONFIG
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ALTER KEYSPACE
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ALTER SEARCH INDEX CONFIG
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ALTER SEARCH INDEX SCHEMA
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COMMIT SEARCH INDEX
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CREATE KEYSPACE
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CREATE SEARCH INDEX
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CREATE TRIGGER
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CREATE FUNCTION
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DESCRIBE FUNCTION
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DROP FUNCTION
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DROP KEYSPACE
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DROP SEARCH INDEX CONFIG
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DROP TRIGGER
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LIST PERMISSIONS
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REBUILD SEARCH INDEX
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RELOAD SEARCH INDEX
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RESTRICT
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RESTRICT ROWS
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UNRESTRICT
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UNRESTRICT ROWS
For supported CQL commands, see the Astra DB CQL quick reference.
cassandra.yaml
If you are an experienced Cassandra or DataStax Enterprise user, you are likely familiar with editing the cassandra.yaml file.
For Astra DB, the cassandra.yaml file cannot be configured.
The following limits are included in Astra DB:
// for read requests
page_size_failure_threshold_in_kb = 512
in_select_cartesian_product_failure_threshold = 25
partition_keys_in_select_failure_threshold = 20
tombstone_warn_threshold = 1000
tombstone_failure_threshold = 100000
// for write requests
batch_size_warn_threshold_in_kb = 5
batch_size_fail_threshold_in_kb = 50
unlogged_batch_across_partitions_warn_threshold = 10
user_timestamps_enabled = true
column_value_size_failure_threshold_in_kb = 5 * 2048L
read_before_write_list_operations_enabled = false
max_mutation_size_in_kb = 16384
// for schema
fields_per_udt_failure_threshold = 30 (Classic) or 60 (Serverless)
collection_size_warn_threshold_in_kb = 5 * 1024L
items_per_collection_warn_threshold = 20
columns_per_table_failure_threshold = 50 (Classic) or 75 (Serverless)
secondary_index_per_table_failure_threshold = 1
tables_warn_threshold = 100
tables_failure_threshold = 200
// for node status
disk_usage_percentage_warn_threshold = 70
disk_usage_percentage_failure_threshold = 80
partition_size_warn_threshold_in_mb = 100
// SAI Table Failure threshold
sai_indexes_per_table_failure_threshold = 10