[CASSANDRA-7274] Better display table organization on desc table via primary key list

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Resolved
• Priority: Low
• Resolution: Fixed
• Fix Version/s: 2.0.9
• Assignee: Patrick McFadin
• Reporter: G Gordon Worley III

Authors

Patrick McFadin

Reviewers

Aleksey Yeschenko

• Created: 20/May/14 22:54
• Updated: 16/Apr/19 09:31
• Resolved: 25/May/14 15:18

Description

In cqlsh, the desc table command does not make it sufficiently clear which columns are part of the row key and which are clustering keys.

A simple change to the primary key list, though, would make it easier to tell.

Consider the following table definition:

create table my_table {
  first_column text,
  second_column text,
  third_column text,
  primary key (first_column, second_column, third_column)
}

This table has a row key of first_column and clustering keys of second_column, third_column. But if the user intended for the table to have all three in the row key, the correct definition would be:

create table my_table {
  first_column text,
  second_column text,
  third_column text,
  primary key ((first_column, second_column, third_column))
}

But this is a sufficiently subtle difference that the first may be mistaken for the second or vice-versa.

My suggested solution is to always wrap the row key in parentheses. This is already supported by create table syntax, so it's just a matter of changing desc table to display the create table statement with the primary key always in parentheses, like so:

create table my_table {
  first_column text,
  second_column text,
  third_column text,
  primary key ((first_column), second_column, third_column)
}