Normal Description
It's not clear why, but the CQL grammar specification in Cql.g allows for an empty WHERE clause on DELETE, i.e.:
DELETE FROM someCF WHERE;
When this is used, with or without a column list, it causes an NPE on the node processing the CQL. Traceback on a recent 1.0.0 build:
ERROR [pool-2-thread-1] 2011-10-11 15:45:25,655 Cassandra.java (line 4082) Internal error processing execute_cql_query
java.lang.NullPointerException
at org.apache.cassandra.cql.CqlParser.deleteStatement(CqlParser.java:1994)
at org.apache.cassandra.cql.CqlParser.query(CqlParser.java:292)
at org.apache.cassandra.cql.QueryProcessor.getStatement(QueryProcessor.java:984)
at org.apache.cassandra.cql.QueryProcessor.process(QueryProcessor.java:500)
at org.apache.cassandra.thrift.CassandraServer.execute_cql_query(CassandraServer.java:1268)
at org.apache.cassandra.thrift.Cassandra$Processor$execute_cql_query.process(Cassandra.java:4072)
at org.apache.cassandra.thrift.Cassandra$Processor.process(Cassandra.java:2889)
at org.apache.cassandra.thrift.CustomTThreadPoolServer$WorkerProcess.run(CustomTThreadPoolServer.java:187)
at java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor$Worker.runTask(ThreadPoolExecutor.java:886)
at java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor$Worker.run(ThreadPoolExecutor.java:908)
at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:680)
The CQL client gets an error with the message, "Internal application error".
It might be better to allow leaving off the "WHERE" as well as the condition, to match SQL semantics, although fixing that probably won't solve this problem.