What happens when you are mainly concerned about the human readable formats? Say initially you don't supply metadata for a key like foo in the column family, but you get tired of seeing binary data displayed for the values so you update the column family to get a more human readable format by adding metadata for foo. Will this work?
From: aaron morton [mailto:aa...@thelastpickle.com] Sent: Sunday, November 11, 2012 3:39 PM To: user@cassandra.apache.org Subject: Re: CREATE COLUMNFAMILY Also most idomatic clients use the information so they can return the appropriate type to you. Can the metadata be applied after the fact? If so how? UPDATE COLUMN FAMILY in the CLI will let you change it. Note that we do not update the existing data. This can be a problem if you do something like change a variable length integer to a fixed length one. Cheers ----------------- Aaron Morton Freelance Developer @aaronmorton http://www.thelastpickle.com On 12/11/2012, at 8:06 AM, Kevin Burton <rkevinbur...@charter.net> wrote: Thank you this helps with my understanding. So the goal here is to supply as many name/type pairs as can be reasonably be foreseen when the column family is created? Can the metadata be applied after the fact? If so how? -----Original Message----- From: Edward Capriolo [mailto:edlinuxg...@gmail.com] Sent: Sunday, November 11, 2012 9:37 AM To: user@cassandra.apache.org Subject: Re: CREATE COLUMNFAMILY If you supply metadata cassandra can use it for several things. 1) It validates data on insertion 2) Helps display the information in human readable formats in tools like the CLI and sstabletojson 3) If you add a built-in secondary index the type information is needed, strings sort differently then integer 4) columns in rows are sorted by the column name, strings sort differently then integers On Sat, Nov 10, 2012 at 11:55 PM, Kevin Burton <rkevinbur...@charter.net> wrote: I am sure this has been asked before but what is the purpose of entering key/value or more correctly key name/data type values on the CREATE COLUMNFAMILY command.
