Sounds interesting to me. I looked into adding protocol buffer support at one point, and it didn't look like it would be too much work. The tricky part was I also wanted to add indexing support for attributes of the inserted protocol buffers. That looked a little trickier, but still not impossible. Though other stuff came up and I never got around to actually writing any code. JSON support would be nice, especially if you figured out how to get built in indexing of the attributes inside the JSON to work =).
-Jeremiah On Mar 28, 2012, at 10:58 AM, Ben McCann wrote: > Hi, > > I was wondering if it would be interesting to add some type of > document-oriented data type. > > I've found it somewhat awkward to store document-oriented data in Cassandra > today. I can make a JSON/Protobuf/Thrift, serialize it, and store it, but > Cassandra cannot differentiate it from any other string or byte array. > However, if my column validation_class could be a JsonType that would > allow tools to potentially do more interesting introspection on the column > value. E.g. bug 3647 > <https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-3647>calls for > supporting arbitrarily nested "documents" in CQL. Running a > query against the JSON column in Pig is possible as well, but again in this > use case it would be helpful to be able to encode in column metadata that > the column is stored as JSON. For debugging, running nightly reports, etc. > it would be quite useful compared to the opaque string and byte array types > we have today. JSON is appealing because it would be easy to implement. > Something like Thrift or Protocol Buffers would actually be interesting > since they would be more space efficient. However, they would also be a > bit more difficult to implement because of the extra typing information > they provide. I'm hoping with Cassandra 1.0's addition of compression that > storing JSON is not too inefficient. > > Would there be interest in adding a JsonType? I could look at putting a > patch together. > > Thanks, > Ben
