[CASSANDRA-4361] CQL3: allow definition with only a PK

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Resolved
• Priority: Normal
• Resolution: Fixed
• Fix Version/s: 1.2.0 beta 1
• Component/s: Legacy/CQL
• Labels: cql3
• Assignee: Sylvain Lebresne
• Reporter: Sylvain Lebresne

Authors

Sylvain Lebresne

Reviewers

Jonathan Ellis

• Created: 20/Jun/12 16:50
• Updated: 16/Apr/19 09:32
• Resolved: 24/Jul/12 07:36

Description

Currently, in CQL3 and contrarily to SQL, one cannot define a table having only a PK but no other columns. Related to that, a CQL always needs at least one column outside of the PK to be inserted to exist. All that may force people to add 'fake' value that they don't really need.

The goal of this ticket is to lift that limitation and allow table definition to have only a PK, and to have CQL rows exist even if only the PK has been inserted (in other words, to have CQL rows behave like SQL rows).

Following CASSANDRA-4329, one way to do that with the sparse-composite encoding CQL3 uses would be to insert as marker of the CQL row presence a CQL column with an empty name (the underlying column name won't be empty though since it's a composite). The drawback though is that we will need to insert that marker with every insert to the CQL row (in other word, we'll add a slight overhead to the size of each write). The pros is that if we have such marker for the CQL row presence, we will be able to reoptimize back queries that select only a few columns (since following CASSANDRA-3982 we query all columns of a CQL row every time).

Issue Links

• requires: CASSANDRA-4329 CQL3: Always use composite types by default