I like the aim of the CEP. Completely onboard with the idea that GenAI
tooling works better when you can provide it useful context about the
data it is working with. An organization I worked with in the past had a
lot of good results with marking up API models (not DB schemas, but
similar idea) with authorization-related annotations and using those to
drive policy linters and end-user interfaces. So, sold on the value of
the capability.
Two things I'm less sure of:
1) User-defined vs pre-defined annotation types: I appreciate the
flexibility that user-defined annotations appears to give, but it adds
extra room for error. E.g. if annotation names are case-sensitive, do I
(the user) have to actively prevent creation of @description? Or, police
the accidental creation of alternative names like @Desc? If the
community settled on a small, fixed set of supported annotations, so
Cassandra itself was authoritative for valid annotation names, would
make the feature a lot less valuable, or prevent offering user-defined
annotations in the future?
2) Syntactically, is it worth considering other alternatives? I was
trying to imagine a CREATE TABLE statement marked up with two or three
types of column-level annotations, and my sense is that it could get
hard to read quickly. Is it worth considering Javadoc-style annotations
in schema comments instead? I think in today's world that means that
they would not be accessible via CQL/Cassandra (CQL comments are not
persisted as part of the schema, correct?) but they could be accessible
to other schema-processing tools and IMO be a more readable syntax. It'd
be good to work through a couple use-cases for actually using the data
provided by the annotations and get a sense of whether making them
first-class entities in CQL is necessary for getting most of the value
from them.
Thanks -- Joel.
On 8/6/2025 6:59 PM, Jyothsna Konisa wrote:
Sorry for the incorrect editable link, here is the updated link to the
CEP 52: Schema Annotations for ApacheCassandra
<https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/CASSANDRA/CEP+52%3A+Schema+Annotations+for+ApacheCassandra>
On Wed, Aug 6, 2025 at 4:26 PM Jyothsna Konisa
<jyothsna1...@gmail.com> wrote:
Hello Everyone!
We would like to propose CEP 52: Schema Annotations for
ApacheCassandra
<https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/pages/resumedraft.action?draftId=373887528&draftShareId=339b7f4e-9bc2-45bd-9a80-b0d4215e3f45&;>
This CEP outlines a plan to introduce*Schema Annotations*as a way
to add better context to schema elements. We're also proposing a
set of new DDL statements to manage these annotations.
We believe these annotations will be highly beneficial for several
key areas:
*
GenAI Applications:Providing more context to LLMs could
significantly improve the accuracy and relevance of generated
content.
*
Data Governance:Annotations can help in enforcing policies
using annotations
*
Compliance:They can be used to track and manage compliance
requirements directly within the schema.
We're eager to hear your thoughts and feedback on this proposal.
Please keep the discussion within this mailing thread.
Thanks for your time and feedback in advance.
Best regards,
Jyothsna & Yifan
