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Subject: State Of: CQL
From: Eric Evans <eevans@rackspace.com>
To: dev@cassandra.apache.org, client-dev@cassandra.apache.org
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Date: Fri, 18 Mar 2011 14:54:13 -0500
Message-ID: <1300478053.5148.63.camel@erebus.lan>
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With 3 weeks and change until the branch-and-feature-freeze, I thought
I'd take a few moments to update everyone on the current state of CQL.

Goals and Progress[1]
---------------------
The overarching goal of course, is to create a compelling replacement
for the RPC interface, one that is less baroque, comparable in
performance, and stable across Cassandra release versions.

The goals for Cassandra 0.8 are to meet or exceed the point of minimum
usability.  That is to say, a significant number of users/applications
can make use of it.  I believe we're on track to achieve that.

Already complete:
* Complete data manipulation (SELECT, UPDATE, DELETE, TRUNCATE ...)
* Partial DDL, enough to create a schema, (ALTER is missing).
* Drivers for Python (including Twisted), and Java (JDBC).
* Language documentation (doc/cql/CQL.html)

Remaining for 0.8:
* Support for typed keys[2].
* Tests, tests, and more tests.


What comes next (after 0.8)
---------------------------

* Benchmarking and optimization
* Completion of DDL (ALTER ...).
* Prepared statements
* Custom, line protocol (no more Thrift).
* ... ?


What you can do
---------------

* Play/test/experiment, and file bug reports.  The Python driver's
interactive interpreter is a good place to start (drivers/py/cqlsh).
* Write system tests (test/system/test_cql.py).
* Write language drivers.
* Write documentation.
* Pick up unclaimed tickets tagged "cql"[3].
* Port libraries and applications (and file bug reports).

Thoughts, comments, questions?

[1]: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-1703
[2]: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-2311
[3]: http://goo.gl/cSPlc

-- 
Eric Evans
eevans@rackspace.com