[CASSANDRA-16733] Allow operators to disable 'ALTER ... DROP COMPACT STORAGE' statements

• Type: Bug
• Status: Resolved
• Priority: Normal
• Resolution: Fixed
• Fix Version/s: 3.0.25, 3.11.11, 4.0-rc2, 4.0
• Component/s: Legacy/CQL
• Bug Category: Correctness
• Severity: Normal
• Complexity: Normal
• Discovered By: User Report
• Platform: All
• Since Version: 3.0.16

Source Control Link

https://github.com/apache/cassandra/commit/9b6dd382bdf4a71c06091736ff98cb1307ff0e97

Test and Documentation Plan

The patch add a test to check the flag behavior

• Assignee: Benjamin Lerer
• Reporter: Benjamin Lerer

Authors

Benjamin Lerer

Reviewers

Andres de la Peña, Brandon Williams

• Created: 11/Jun/21 13:08
• Updated: 29/Feb/24 22:42
• Resolved: 18/Jun/21 13:29

Description

ALTER ... DROP COMPACT STORAGE statements have not been extensively tested and suffer from several issues like:

• As COMPACT tables did not have primary key liveness there empty rows
  inserted AFTER the ALTER will be returned whereas the one inserted before
  the ALTER will not.
• Also due to the lack of primary key liveness the amount of SSTables being
  read will increase resulting in slower queries (CASSANDRA-16675)
• After DROP COMPACT it becomes possible to ALTER the table in a way that
  makes all the row disappears
• There is a loss of functionality around null clustering when dropping
  compact storage (CASSANDRA-16069)

To avoid running into those issues this ticket will introduce a new flag that allow operators to disable those statements on their clusters.

see https://www.mail-archive.com/[e-mail]/msg16789.html