Michaël Figuière created CASSANDRA-8878:
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Summary: Counter Tables should be more clearly identified
Key: CASSANDRA-8878
URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-8878
Project: Cassandra
Issue Type: Improvement
Reporter: Michaël Figuière
Priority: Minor
Counter tables are internally considered as a particular kind of table,
different from the regular ones. This counter specific nature is implicitly
defined by the fact that columns within a table have the {{counter}} data type.
This nature turns out to be persistent over the time, that is if the user do
the following:
{code}
CREATE TABLE counttable (key uuid primary key, count counter);
ALTER TABLE counttable DROP count;
ALTER TABLE counttable ADD count2 int;
{code}
The following error will be thrown:
{code}
Cannot add a non counter column (count2) in a counter column family
{code}
Even if the table doesn't have any counter column anymore. This implicit,
persistent nature can be challenging to understand for users (and impossible to
infer in the case above). For this reason a more explicit declaration of
counter tables would be appropriate, as:
{code}
CREATE COUNTER TABLE counttable (key uuid primary key, count counter);
{code}
Besides that, adding a boolean {{counter_table}} column in the
{{system.schema_columnfamilies}} table would allow external tools to easily
differentiate a counter table from a regular one.
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