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Sylvain Lebresne commented on CASSANDRA-8878:
---------------------------------------------
For the record, I'm in favor of adding the {{CREATE COUNTER TABLE}} syntax as
that's imo the more explicit (and counter tables are different enough that it's
worth being explicit), though obviously for the sake of backward compatibility
we'll have to leave that optional. Still, we can encourage using the new syntax
once we have it, and perhaps more importantly, cqlsh {{DESCRIBE}} can start
including it for counters table, making the example of the description less
surprising.
> Counter Tables should be more clearly identified
> ------------------------------------------------
>
> Key: CASSANDRA-8878
> URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-8878
> Project: Cassandra
> Issue Type: Improvement
> Reporter: Michaël Figuière
> Assignee: Aleksey Yeschenko
> Priority: Minor
> Fix For: 3.0
>
>
> Counter tables are internally considered as a particular kind of table,
> different from the regular ones. This counter specific nature is implicitly
> defined by the fact that columns within a table have the {{counter}} data
> type. This nature turns out to be persistent over the time, that is if the
> user do the following:
> {code}
> CREATE TABLE counttable (key uuid primary key, count counter);
> ALTER TABLE counttable DROP count;
> ALTER TABLE counttable ADD count2 int;
> {code}
> The following error will be thrown:
> {code}
> Cannot add a non counter column (count2) in a counter column family
> {code}
> Even if the table doesn't have any counter column anymore. This implicit,
> persistent nature can be challenging to understand for users (and impossible
> to infer in the case above). For this reason a more explicit declaration of
> counter tables would be appropriate, as:
> {code}
> CREATE COUNTER TABLE counttable (key uuid primary key, count counter);
> {code}
> Besides that, adding a boolean {{counter_table}} column in the
> {{system.schema_columnfamilies}} table would allow external tools to easily
> differentiate a counter table from a regular one.
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