[CASSANDRA-12232] Add +=/-= shortcut syntax

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Resolved
• Priority: Low
• Resolution: Fixed
• Fix Version/s: 3.10
• Component/s: Legacy/CQL
• Labels: doc-impacting
• Assignee: Alex Petrov
• Reporter: Sylvain Lebresne

Authors

Alex Petrov

Reviewers

Benjamin Lerer

• Created: 19/Jul/16 08:49
• Updated: 16/Apr/19 09:30
• Resolved: 26/Sep/16 10:01

Description

For collections and counters, the current syntax to add/remove elements is:

UPDATE foo SET myCollection = myCollection + ...;

which is fine, though it's already tad annoying to have to repeat myCollection.

But moving forward, with tickets CASSANDRA-7826, we'll start being able to add to nested collections and we'll end up with queries like:

UPDATE foo SET myCollection['someElement']['otherElemnt'] = myCollection['someElement']['otherElemnt'] + ...;

where the repetition is starting to be really annoying and it makes the query less readable.

It's trivial however to add a +=/-= shortcut syntax which would read instead:

UPDATE foo SET myCollection['someElement']['otherElemnt'] += ...;

As this would just be syntactic sugar, it only requires a few minor addition to the grammar and this would be completely optional: if some users prefer the verbose syntax, that's fine.

Also note that while this will be even more useful after things like CASSANDRA-7826, it's already a nice to have today so it's not dependent on that latter ticket in any way.

Issue Links

• breaks: CASSANDRA-13197 +=/-= shortcut syntax bugs/inconsistencies