Creating a keyspace

A keyspace is a collection of related tables, equivalent to a database in a relational system. To create the keyspace for our MyStatus application, issue the following statement in the CQL shell:

CREATE KEYSPACE "my_status"
WITH REPLICATION = {
  'class': 'SimpleStrategy', 'replication_factor': 1
};

Here we created a keyspace called my_status, which we will use for the remainder of this book. When we create a keyspace, we have to specify replication options. Cassandra provides several strategies for managing replication of data; SimpleStrategy is the best strategy as long as your Cassandra deployment does not span multiple data centers. The replication_factor value tells Cassandra how many copies of each piece of data are to be kept in the cluster; since we are only running a single instance of Cassandra, there is no point in keeping more than one copy of the data. In a production deployment, you would certainly want a higher replication factor; 3 is a good place to start.

USE "my_status";