[CASSANDRA-8374] Better support of null for UDF

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Resolved
• Priority: Normal
• Resolution: Fixed
• Fix Version/s: 2.2.0 beta 1
• Labels: cql3.3 udf
• Impacts: Docs
• Assignee: Robert Stupp
• Reporter: Sylvain Lebresne

Authors

Robert Stupp

Reviewers

Benjamin Lerer

• Created: 26/Nov/14 09:47
• Updated: 06/Nov/19 22:04
• Resolved: 15/May/15 17:38

Description

Currently, every function needs to deal with it's argument potentially being null. There is very many case where that's just annoying, users should be able to define a function like:

CREATE FUNCTION addTwo(val int) RETURNS int LANGUAGE JAVA AS 'return val + 2;'

without having this crashing as soon as a column it's applied to doesn't a value for some rows (I'll note that this definition apparently cannot be compiled currently, which should be looked into).

In fact, I think that by default methods shouldn't have to care about null values: if the value is null, we should not call the method at all and return null. There is still methods that may explicitely want to handle null (to return a default value for instance), so maybe we can add an ALLOW NULLS to the creation syntax.

Issue Links

• links to: Git branch (v2)