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https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-8480?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel&focusedCommentId=14248363#comment-14248363
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Jason Kania commented on CASSANDRA-8480:
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Ultimately as active contributors, you will decide whether you want to do this, 
but the issue is that usability of the DB is seriously hampered. I have read 
many responses from the Cassandra development team that make the statement that 
"the schema modeling is incorrect", but without a really comprehensive set of 
examples to explain how one would model in such scenarios, it will drive away 
users. I personally have no idea how I could model other than what I have done 
given the circular dependencies that I stated above. I have had to model to 
accommodate restrictions as the majority of my efforts and if you look at the 
problems many people encounter and ask for assistance with, it is usually tied 
to these restrictions.

The problem I stated above that "if you can update a column, you can't search 
for it, or if you can search on a column, you can't update it" shuts down many 
uses of the database.

> Update of primary key should be possible
> ----------------------------------------
>
>                 Key: CASSANDRA-8480
>                 URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-8480
>             Project: Cassandra
>          Issue Type: Improvement
>          Components: API
>            Reporter: Jason Kania
>
> While attempting to update a column in a row, I encountered the error
> PRIMARY KEY part thingy found in SET part
> The error is not helpful as it doesn't state why this is problem so I looked 
> on google and encountered many, many entries from people who have experienced 
> the issue including those with single column table who have to hack to work 
> around this.
> After looking around further in the documentation, I discovered that it is 
> not possible to update a primary key but I still have not found a good 
> explanation. I suspect that that this is because it would change the indexing 
> location of the record effectively requiring a delete followed by an insert. 
> If the question is one of guaranteeing no update to a deleted row, a client 
> will have the same issue.
> To me, this really should be handled behind the API because:
> 1) it is an expected capability in a database to update all columns and 
> having these limitations only puts off potential users especially when they 
> have to discover the limitation after the fact
> 2) being able to use a column in a WHERE clause requires it to be part of the 
> primary key so what this limitation means is if you can update a column, you 
> can't search for it, or if you can search on a column, you can't update it 
> which leaves a serious gap in handling a wide number of use cases.
> 3) deleting and inserting a row with an updated primary key will mean sucking 
> in all the data from the row up to the client and sending it all back down 
> even when a single column in the primary key was all that was updated.
> Why not document the issue but make the interface more usable by supporting 
> the operation?
> Jason



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