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
