Inserting a null value creates a tombstone. Tombstones can have major performance implications. You can see the tombstones using sstable2json. If you have a small number of records with null values this seems OK, otherwise I recommend using the QueryBuilder (for Java clients) and waiting for https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-7304
From: Matthew Johnson [mailto:matt.john...@algomi.com] Sent: Wednesday, April 29, 2015 11:37 AM To: user@cassandra.apache.org Subject: Inserting null values Hi all, I have some fields that I am storing into Cassandra, but some of them could be null at any given point. As there are quite a lot of them, it makes the code much more readable if I don’t check each one for null before adding it to the INSERT. I can see a few Jiras around CQL 3 supporting inserting nulls: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-3783 https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-5648 But I have tested inserting null and it seems to work fine (when querying the table with cqlsh, it shows up as a red lowercase null). Are there any obvious pitfalls to look out for that I have missed? Could it be a performance concern to insert a row with some nulls, as opposed to checking the values first and inserting the row and just omitting those columns? Thanks! Matt
