Thank you all for the advice!
I have decided to use the Insert query builder ( *com.datastax.driver.core.querybuilder.Insert*) which allows me to dynamically insert as many or as few columns as I need, and doesn’t require multiple prepared statements. Then, I will look at Ali’s suggestion – I will create a small helper method like ‘addToInsertIfNotNull’ and pump all my values into that, which will then filter out the ones that are null. Should keep the code nice and neat – I will feed back if I find any problems with this approach (but please jump in if you have already spotted any :)). Thanks! Matt *From:* Robert Wille [mailto:rwi...@fold3.com] *Sent:* 29 April 2015 15:16 *To:* user@cassandra.apache.org *Subject:* Re: Inserting null values I’ve come across the same thing. I have a table with at least half a dozen columns that could be null, in any combination. Having a prepared statement for each permutation of null columns just isn’t going to happen. I don’t want to build custom queries each time because I have a really cool system of managing my queries that relies on them being prepared. Fortunately for me, I should have at most a handful of tombstones in each partition, and most of my records are written exactly once. So, I just let the tombstones get written and they’ll eventually get compacted out and life will go on. It’s annoying and not ideal, but what can you do? On Apr 29, 2015, at 2:36 AM, Matthew Johnson <matt.john...@algomi.com> wrote: 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
