Hi Aaron, Thanks for the answer. That makes sense and I can see it as a formal reason for returning empty columns, but as a practical matter, is there a situation in which that behavior would be useful?
Unfortunately a column slice won't do the trick -- the columns we're looking for at any given time wouldn't correspond to a particular range; it's essentially "random access". For what it's worth, I've managed to make this operation about 30x faster in a quick benchmark by just not selecting for specific columns at all, and throwing away columns I don't care about in the application layer instead. It's unclear whether the performance improvements will continue to accrue as the column family becomes more densely populated, though. Anyway, thanks again! Mat On Fri, Aug 17, 2012 at 5:06 AM, aaron morton <aa...@thelastpickle.com> wrote: > If you specify the columns by name in the select clause the query returns > them because they should be projected in the result set. > > Can you use a column slice instead ? > > Cheers > > ----------------- > Aaron Morton > Freelance Developer > @aaronmorton > http://www.thelastpickle.com > > On 17/08/2012, at 11:09 AM, Mat Brown <m...@brewster.com> wrote: > > Hello all, > > I've noticed that when performing a SELECT statement with a list of > columns specified, Cassandra returns all columns in the resulting > row(s) even if they have no value. This creates an apparently > considerable amount of transport and deserialization overhead, > particularly in one use case I'm looking at, in which we select a > large collection of columns but expect only a small fraction of them > to contain values. Is there any way to get around this and only > receive columns that have values in the results? > > Thanks, > Mat > >
