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  <div class="section" id="inserting-and-querying">
<h1>Inserting and querying<a class="headerlink" href="#inserting-and-querying" title="Permalink to this headline">¶</a></h1>
<p>The API to Cassandra is <a class="reference internal" href="../cql/index.html#cql"><span class="std std-ref">CQL</span></a>, the Cassandra Query Language. To use CQL, you will need to connect to the
cluster, which can be done:</p>
<ul class="simple">
<li>either using cqlsh,</li>
<li>or through a client driver for Cassandra.</li>
</ul>
<div class="section" id="cqlsh">
<h2>CQLSH<a class="headerlink" href="#cqlsh" title="Permalink to this headline">¶</a></h2>
<p>cqlsh is a command line shell for interacting with Cassandra through CQL. It is shipped with every Cassandra package,
and can be found in the bin/ directory alongside the cassandra executable. It connects to the single node specified on
the command line. For example:</p>
<div class="highlight-default notranslate"><div class="highlight"><pre><span></span>$ bin/cqlsh localhost
Connected to Test Cluster at localhost:9042.
[cqlsh 5.0.1 | Cassandra 3.8 | CQL spec 3.4.2 | Native protocol v4]
Use HELP for help.
cqlsh&gt; SELECT cluster_name, listen_address FROM system.local;

 cluster_name | listen_address
--------------+----------------
 Test Cluster |      127.0.0.1

(1 rows)
cqlsh&gt;
</pre></div>
</div>
<p>See the <a class="reference internal" href="../tools/cqlsh.html#cqlsh"><span class="std std-ref">cqlsh section</span></a> for full documentation.</p>
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<div class="section" id="client-drivers">
<h2>Client drivers<a class="headerlink" href="#client-drivers" title="Permalink to this headline">¶</a></h2>
<p>A lot of client drivers are provided by the Community and a list of known drivers is provided in <a class="reference internal" href="drivers.html#client-drivers"><span class="std std-ref">the next section</span></a>. You should refer to the documentation of each drivers for more information on how to use them.</p>
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