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Date: Tue, 12 Jul 2011 14:46:23 +0300
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Subject: Predefined columns for Secondary index
From: osishkin osishkin <osishkin@gmail.com>
To: user@cassandra.apache.org
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I'm thinking about Secondary indexes as an alternative for using
column families to index my data.
I'd appreciate some answers to basic questions about this new feature.

1. Can you insert a row to a column family with a predefined column
metadata (and secondary index for these columns) that does not contain
one/all of the predifened columns?
will Cassnadra insert a dummy column?

2. And also ,how will a query on a column that is indexed treat the
above situation? is there a performance penalty?

If I use an example from Datastax:
> create column family users with comparator=UTF8Type
... and column_metadata=[{column_name: full_name, validation_class: UTF8Type},
... {column_name: birth_date, validation_class: LongType, index_type: KEYS}];

set users[bsanderson][full_name] = 'Brandon Sanderson';
set users[bsanderson][birth_date] = 1975;
set users[msanderson][full_name] = 'Michael Sanderson';

and now I query
> get users where birth_date = 1975;

Thank you