generalized way of expressing hierarchical values -------------------------------------------------
Key: CASSANDRA-2025 URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-2025 Project: Cassandra Issue Type: Sub-task Components: API Reporter: Eric Evans Assignee: Eric Evans Priority: Minor Fix For: 0.8 While hashing out {{CREATE KEYSPACE}}, it became obvious that we needed a syntax for expressing hierarchical values. Properties like {{replication_factor}} can be expressed simply using keyword arguments like ({{replication_factor = 3}}), but {{strategy_options}} is a map of strings. The solution I took in CASSANDRA-1709 was to dot-delimit "map name" and option key, so for example: {code:style=SQL} CREATE KEYSPACE keyspace WITH ... AND strategy_options.DC1 = "1" ... {code} This led me to wonder if this was a general enough approach for any future cases that might come up. One example might be compound/composite column names. Dot-delimiting is a bad choice here since it rules out ever introducing a float literal. One suggestion would be to colon-delimit, so for example: {code:style=SQL} CREATE KEYSPACE keyspace WITH ... AND strategy_options:DC1 = "1" ... {code} As an aside, this also led me to the conclusion that {{CONSISTENCY.<LEVEL>}} is probably a bad choice for consistency level specification. It mirrors the underlying enum for no good reason and should probably be changed to {{CONSISTENCY <LEVEL>}} (i.e. omitting the separator). For example: {code:style=SQL} SELECT column FROM Standard2 USING CONSISTENCY QUORUM WHERE KEY = key; {code} Thoughts? -- This message is automatically generated by JIRA. - You can reply to this email to add a comment to the issue online.