Setting up a user

By default, Cassandra has one user account configured; its username is cassandra and it is a superuser, meaning there are no restrictions on what it can do to the database. When you connect as a superuser, it's essentially the same as if Cassandra did not have authorization enabled at all.

In order to do something useful with our access restrictions, we'll want to set up another user account that is not a superuser. Let's say one of the departments in the burgeoning MyStatus corporation is a data analytics team. This team needs access to read data from our Cassandra cluster, but has no need to add, change, or remove data. We'll set up a user account for this team that gives them only the access they need.

First, we'll use the CREATE USER command to add a user account for the analytics team:

CREATE USER 'data_analytics'
WITH PASSWORD 'strongpassword'
NOSUPERUSER;

Note, of course, that in a real deployment we would want to choose...