Hi everybody, There are a significant amount of issues with DROP COMPACT STORAGE that can be pretty surprising for users. To name a few: * Some hidden columns will show up changing the resultset returned for wildcard queries * As COMPACT tables did not have primary key liveness there empty rows inserted AFTER the ALTER will be returned whereas the one inserted before the ALTER will not. * Also due to the lack of primary key liveness the amount of SSTables being read will increase resulting in slower queries * After DROP COMPACT it becomes possible to ALTER the table in a way that makes all the row disappears * There is a loss of functionality around null clustering when dropping compact storage (CASSANDRA-16069)
In my opinion DROP COMPACT STORAGE is not ready for production use unless users fully understand what they are doing. By consequence, I am wondering if we should not mark it as experimental as we did for the Materialized Views (CASSANDRA-13959). What is your opinion?
