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https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-3625?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel&focusedCommentId=13169057#comment-13169057
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Ed Anuff commented on CASSANDRA-3625:
-------------------------------------
Each component in a composite consists of a type (either an alias byte or a
Cassandra comparator type name) and the value. I'm suggesting doing a compare
on the type in the case of types not being equivalent. The comparison could be
a lexical compare or a hash comparison. I think doing the compare on the
component type is better since the purpose of the composite is for slices and
if we do a lexical compare of the component values then the slices are going to
have weird results in the middle of them. For example, a row that had dynamic
composite columns ("ed",5), ("jonathan",6), and (103, 32), that was sliced from
("ed") to ("jonathan") could have the (103, 32) in the middle. If we compare
on the type, then that never happens.
> Do something about DynamicCompositeType
> ---------------------------------------
>
> Key: CASSANDRA-3625
> URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-3625
> Project: Cassandra
> Issue Type: Improvement
> Components: Core
> Reporter: Sylvain Lebresne
>
> Currently, DynamicCompositeType is a super dangerous type. We cannot leave it
> that way or people will get hurt.
> Let's recall that DynamicCompositeType allows composite column names without
> any limitation on what each component type can be. It was added to basically
> allow to use different rows of the same column family to each store a
> different index. So for instance you would have:
> {noformat}
> index1: {
> "bar":24 -> someval
> "bar":42 -> someval
> "foo":12 -> someval
> ...
> }
> index2: {
> 0:uuid1:3.2 -> someval
> 1:uuid2:2.2 -> someval
> ...
> }
> ....
> {noformat}
> where index1, index2, ... are rows.
> So each row have columns whose names have similar structure (so they can be
> compared), but between rows the structure can be different (we neve compare
> two columns from two different rows).
> But the problem is the following: what happens if in the index1 row above,
> you insert a column whose name is 0:uuid1 ? There is no really meaningful way
> to compare "bar":24 and 0:uuid1. The current implementation of
> DynamicCompositeType, when confronted with this, says that it is a user error
> and throw a MarshalException.
> The problem with that is that the exception is not throw at insert time, and
> it *cannot* be because of the dynamic nature of the comparator. But that
> means that if you do insert the wrong column in the wrong row, you end up
> *corrupting* a sstable.
> It is too dangerous a behavior. And it's probably made worst by the fact that
> some people probably think that DynamicCompositeType should be superior to
> CompositeType since you know, it's dynamic.
> One solution to that problem could be to decide of some random (but
> predictable) order between two incomparable component. For example we could
> design that IntType < LongType < StringType ...
> Note that even if we do that, I would suggest renaming the
> DynamicCompositeType to something that suggest that CompositeType is always
> preferable to DynamicCompositeType unless you're really doing very advanced
> stuffs.
> Opinions?
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