Setting up your Free Cassandra instance - Cassandra Tutorial

- [Kristen] It's time to do some setup now. In order to learn Cassandra, we'll need a database to work with. For this course, we'll be using a free hosted database from DataStax using the Astra product. You may have heard that Cassandra is difficult to configure but with this free service, the heavy lifting has been done for you and you can focus on basic interactions with your data. To sign up, go to the link, https://dtsx.io/cassandra-linkedin-course. You can sign up with a Google account or GitHub account, or just use your email. The account you'll be creating won't cost you anything. You don't have to put in a credit card. You don't need to pay until you exhaust your free resources. The free tier provides millions of reads and writes and 40 gigabytes of storage. Plenty of space for exploration and even enough to run a site for a small or medium business. Okay, here we are on the signup page. I'm going to go ahead and sign up with Google. I'll use an account that hasn't logged in before so that you can see what all the forms look like. Here are the DataStax terms and policies that we need to agree to. I'm going to go ahead and click accept, which brings me back and it wants to learn a little bit about me. So my organization's name. I'm going to put Princess Polymath. That's my website, and I like lots of programming languages but I'll pick Python. You can do whatever you need here. New to Cassandra, NoSQL. I work a startup. I'm doing a training course project and I first heard about it at LinkedIn. And then I will scroll down, click Next. If you wanted to talk to a specialist about Cassandra, you have the ability to do that here. You can schedule a time, but I'm just going to go ahead and finish the sign up. Now I'm going to create the database and I'm going to create a database with the name of linkedin and the key space name is linkedin. We'll talk about what the key space does in the course, but for now, just use LinkedIn. You have to choose the cloud provider that you want to use. I'm going to use Google Cloud. Click on North America. You can see here this first one is not locked. The locked ones actually cost money, but the unlocked ones do not cost money, and I'm going to create my database. And while the database is creating, we can go ahead and talk a little bit about the next things that we're going to be doing. It's going to give us a token for your database. You don't need to save this, but you can save it. It's going to be good if you want to do things with the APIs later in creating applications. What we're doing, we don't need the token for, so you can just go to your database and you can see it's initializing. We're going to wait until it changes from initializing to active, and once it turns to active, we can check it out in the SQL console and move on to the rest of the course. Once your database is active, as you see right here, you can connect to it using the CQL Console. That's what we'll be using for the rest of the course. Just to make sure everything worked out correctly, let's do a desc linkedin and make sure that the key space we created is there. In fact, it is. So now we're ready to move on with the rest of the course.