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https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-7070?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel&focusedCommentId=13977464#comment-13977464
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Benedict commented on CASSANDRA-7070:
-------------------------------------
Hi Jay,
This is indeed a good idea - one there's already a ticket open for. Please feel
free to join the discussion there.
> Virtual column name aliasing
> ----------------------------
>
> Key: CASSANDRA-7070
> URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-7070
> Project: Cassandra
> Issue Type: Improvement
> Components: Core
> Reporter: Jay Patel
> Fix For: 3.0
>
>
> Hi folks!
> Currently, storage space is saved significantly (in terabytes sometime for
> static tables!) by shortening column names as it's repeated in each row;
> however, this short column names can be very unreadable. So far, I've seen
> 10s of tables with 100s of convoluted names. Hard to debug issues, and work
> with on day-to-day basis. This can make smart engineers quit project or even
> company :)
> Another reason: most of the time, folks are not even aware that column names
> are repeated, and end up with really descriptive column names. Then, realize
> waste of disk/ram/network, and spend time on re-implementation and/or crazy
> migration to new table.
> Yet another reason: table might be shared by multiple system, use cases and
> people in organization, e.g. primary/analytics use cases, Ops/Developer, etc.
> Now, it's becoming the issue where we should reliably keep mapping from
> convoluted names to descriptive names. Usually, these mappings are done in
> java enums; I've seen in DB as well, just so Ops folks don't have to
> interpret java code :)
> It would be great if Cassandra internally could virtually alias the column
> names to a more efficient representation in storage.
> I can take a shot at this feature if there are no major concerns. We ideally
> want user to work with descriptive alias everywhere & not even aware of
> internal storage name of the column. Also, I think name/alias mapping needs
> to be cached all the time to avoid any performance hit.. Any thoughts? How
> difficult is it to accommodate? BTW, I think this may not directly apply to
> dynamic tables as we rely on column name for proper ordering of columns in
> wide rows. However, we may have some room there if it's not a clustered
> column..
> Thanks,
> Jay
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