Hi Shailaja,
In the case of machine readable output, CQL uses delimited output ('|')
with whitespace on either side of the data values.
To better support machine readable output, it might be useful to allow
user specified delimiters (in a separate Jira). E.g.:
cqlsh *-s","* -e"CAPTURE '/tmp/props.csv';select * from
system_views.system_properties limit 7"
We could make something like that a precondition here. But it is just
whitespace. I'd agree this shouldn't go into a patch release.
On Mon, Jan 15, 2024 at 1:34 PM <[email protected]> wrote:
> Hi Brad,
>
> While I prefer the indentation style that Postgres following for better
> readability of text, if we are changing it, this may break existing scripts
> of users/operators if tightly coupled with the current format/spaces etc
> (Ideally shouldn’t be, but as Cassandra being used all over the world, such
> scenarios are possible). To avoid breaking such existing scripts, I believe
> either these changes need to happen in a major release or under a feature
> flag (which can be deprecated over the time), for existing scripts to
> continue without breaking until they are fixed.
>
> Thanks,
> Shailaja
>
>
> On Jan 9, 2024, at 5:23 PM, Derek Chen-Becker <[email protected]>
> wrote:
>
> Actually, now that I'm looking at the original email on my browser and not
> my phone (and can see the formatting properly), I think we have the
> nomenclature backward here. Left-alignment in the printing world means that
> text in each cell starts at the left-most column for the cell, but in your
> examples you're calling that right-aligned (and vice-versa). Along the
> lines of what Stefan said, I think this probably came about more as a
> "we'll just keep things simple and use the same alignment everywhere"
> rather than an intentional right-alignment of text for a specific purpose.
> I would actually be fine with left-aligning text to fit what appears to be
> standard practice in other systems.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Derek
>
> On Tue, Jan 9, 2024 at 7:34 AM Brad <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> CQLSH currently left-aligns all output, affecting both numbers and text.
>> While this works well for numbers, a better approach adopted by many is to
>> left align numbers and right align text.
>>
>> For example, both Excel and Postgres shell use the later:
>>
>> psql
>> # select * from employee;
>> empid | name | dept
>> -------+---------+------------
>> 1 | Clark | Sales
>> 200 | Dave | Accounting
>> 33 | Johnson | Sales
>>
>>
>> while CQLSH simply left aligns all the columns
>>
>> cqlsh> select * from employee;
>>
>> empid | dept | name
>> -------+------------+---------
>> 33 | Sales | Johnson
>> 1 | Sales | Clark
>> 200 | Accounting | Dave
>>
>>
>>
>> Left aligned text looks much worse on text values which share common
>> prefixes
>>
>> cqlsh> select * from system_views.system_properties limit 7 ;
>>
>>
>> name | value
>>
>> --------------------------------------------+--------------------------------------------
>> JAVA_HOME |
>> /Users/brad/.jenv/versions/17
>> cassandra.jmx.local.port |
>> 7199
>> cassandra.logdir |
>> /usr/local/cassandra-5.0-beta1/bin/../logs
>> cassandra.storagedir |
>> /usr/local/cassandra-5.0-beta1/bin/../data
>> com.sun.management.jmxremote.authenticate |
>> false
>> com.sun.management.jmxremote.password.file |
>> /etc/cassandra/jmxremote.password
>> io.netty.transport.estimateSizeOnSubmit |
>> false
>>
>>
>>
>> The Jira CASSANDRA-19150
>> <https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-19150> discusses this
>> in further detail with some additional examples.
>>
>> I wanted to raise the issue here to propose changing CQLSH to right-align
>> text while continue to left-align numbers.
>>
>> Regards,
>>
>> Brad Schoening
>>
>> ReplyForward
>> Add reaction
>>
>
>
> --
> +---------------------------------------------------------------+
> | Derek Chen-Becker |
> | GPG Key available at https://keybase.io/dchenbecker and |
> | https://pgp.mit.edu/pks/lookup?search=derek%40chen-becker.org |
> | Fngrprnt: EB8A 6480 F0A3 C8EB C1E7 7F42 AFC5 AFEE 96E4 6ACC |
> +---------------------------------------------------------------+
>
>
>
