[CASSANDRA-5619] CAS UPDATE for a lost race: save round trip by returning column values

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Resolved
• Priority: Normal
• Resolution: Fixed
• Fix Version/s: 2.0 beta 1
• Component/s: Feature/Lightweight Transactions
• Labels: LWT
• Assignee: Sylvain Lebresne
• Reporter: Blair Zajac

Authors

Sylvain Lebresne

Reviewers

Jonathan Ellis

• Created: 06/Jun/13 17:53
• Updated: 25/Oct/19 13:11
• Resolved: 08/Jul/13 16:09

Description

Looking at the new CAS CQL3 support examples [1], if one lost a race for an UPDATE, to save a round trip to get the current values to decide if you need to perform your work, could the columns that were used in the IF clause also be returned to the caller? Maybe the columns values as part of the SET part could also be returned.

I don't know if this is generally useful though.

In the case of creating a new user account with a given username which is the partition key, if one lost the race to another person creating an account with the same username, it doesn't matter to the loser what the column values are, just that they lost.

I'm new to Cassandra, so maybe there's other use cases, such as doing incremental amount of work on a row. In pure Java projects I've done while loops around AtomicReference.html#compareAndSet() until the work was done on the referenced object to handle multiple threads each making forward progress in updating the references object.

[1] https://github.com/riptano/cassandra-dtest/blob/master/cql_tests.py#L3044