[CASSANDRA-14825] Expose table schema for drivers

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Resolved
• Priority: Normal
• Resolution: Fixed
• Fix Version/s: 4.0-beta1, 4.0
• Component/s: Legacy/CQL
• Labels: pull-request-available

Source Control Link

https://github.com/apache/cassandra/commit/4e47bfb3a1abb8074fb9a24f98a97dbf25806522

Test and Documentation Plan

Additional tests + existing tests
A new section has been added to the documentation under DDL

• Assignee: Robert Stupp
• Reporter: Chris Lohfink

Authors

Robert Stupp

Reviewers

Benjamin Lerer, Dinesh Joshi

• Created: 15/Oct/18 20:03
• Updated: 29/Sep/22 09:16
• Resolved: 29/Jun/20 16:10

Description

Currently the drivers recreate the CQL for the tables by putting together the system table values. This is very difficult to keep up to date and buggy enough that its only even supported in Java and Python drivers. Cassandra already has some limited output available for snapshots that we could provide in a virtual table or new query that the drivers can fetch. This can greatly reduce the complexity of drivers while also reducing bugs like CASSANDRA-14822 as the underlying schema and properties change.

Issue Links

• duplicates: CASSANDRA-8005 Server-side DESCRIBE
• fixes: CASSANDRA-15663 DESCRIBE KEYSPACE does not properly quote table names
• is related to: CASSANDRA-15604 Remove obsolete table/MV options from schema tables
• links to: Github PR for DESCRIBE
• links to: Github PR for DESCRIBE (dtest)
• links to: GitHub Pull Request #284
• links to: GitHub Pull Request #284