Our CEO and I both have backgrounds of creating database tools at prior companies, so naturally we’re huge advocates of having good tools at the ready that help increase the productivity of database administrators, ops personnel, and developers.
At DataStax, we provide DataStax OpsCenter for administrators and operations staff, which allows for easy point-and-click management and monitoring of an Apache Cassandra or DataStax Enterprise cluster from a web browser. However, up until now, developers and others who have wanted to easily issue queries against Cassandra and interact with data in an ad-hoc manner have only had command line tools to work with.
I’m happy to say that’s changed now with the introduction of DataStax DevCenter. DevCenter is a free, Eclipse-based tool, which is designed to be a lightweight visual interface that provides developers and others with the ability to easily run CQL queries against Cassandra, view query results, and perform other related tasks.
The first version of DevCenter supplies a basic visual interface that allows for the management of cluster connections, issuing of CQL queries through a multi-tab design, and the review of query results. There will be many more features added to DevCenter after the initial 1.0 release, but for this first version, we wanted to make sure we got the core functionality of the tool down properly before anything else was added.
The first pre-production / technology preview release of DevCenter for the Windows and Mac platforms is available for download now. Be sure to review the README for an understanding of how the tool works and the known limitations that will be removed in future releases.
We welcome your feedback on DevCenter; send your input to devcenter-feedback@datastax.com, and as always, we appreciate your support of Apache Cassandra and DataStax.