Hi everyone, we are working on a Java product based on Cassandra since 0.5, and 
Cassandra made a very huge change in 0.7 beta 2, which changes all byte array 
into ByteBuffers, and we found this problem which confuses us a lot, here's the 
detail about what happened:

The multiget_slice method in Cassandra.Iface indicated that it requires a list 
of keys for multi get slice query, which we believed we have to give every 
individual keys to get the data we need, and according to the Java doc, we will 
get a Map result, which uses a  ByteBuffer as key and ColunmOrSuperColumn as 
value, we made a guess that the ByteBuffer is the key we send for query, in the 
case above, the result Map should looks like if we give a key list <A,B,C> :


Key of A -> Data of A
Key of B -> Data of B
Key of C -> Data of C

In order to get Data of A from the result map, all we need to do is perform a 
resultMap.get(A), but we got problem here: The result map's key is something 
else, it's not the key we gave before, in the case above, it's no longer a list 
of <A,B,C> while the value is exactly the data we need, but it's very 
troublesome we are unable to find the corresponding data from the key.

We made a guess that the key ByteBuffers has been changed in the query process 
due to call by reference, and we found this in the server's source code which 
looks like that the key has been changed unexpectedly in 
org.apache.cassandra.thrift.CassandraServer's getSlice method:

columnFamilies.get(StorageService.getPartitioner().decorateKey(command.key));

Looks like the key has been "decorated" for some purpose, and it's has been 
changed in the process due to the nature of ByteBuffer, and the decorated key 
has been used as the key in the result map.

columnFamiliesMap.put(command.key, thriftifiedColumns);

Are we misinterpreted the Java Doc API or is this is a bug?

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