That is fine. You just have to be careful that you haven't already inserted data which would be rejected by the type you update to, as a client will have issues reading that data back.
-Jeremiah On Nov 11, 2012, at 4:09 PM, Kevin Burton <rkevinbur...@charter.net> wrote: > 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. > > > > >
