How to add secondary index to existing column family with CLI?

["Ryabin, Thomas" <Th...@McKesson.com>]

I want to add a secondary index to an existing column family, but am running into some trouble. I'm trying to use the Cassandra CLI to add the secondary index. The column family is called "books", the column I'm trying to index is called "title", the key validation class is UTF8Type, and the default column value validator is BytesType.

I first tried running this command with no success:
update column family books with column_metadata=[{column_name: title, index_type: KEYS}];

I got the error:
                cannot parse 'title' as hex bytes.


I then tried running:
update column family books with column_metadata=[{column_name: utf8('title'), index_type: KEYS}];

but got the error:
                cannot parse 'FUNCTION_CALL' as hex bytes


Is there something I should be doing differently?

Thanks,
Thomas

Re: How to add secondary index to existing column family with CLI?

[aaron morton <aa...@thelastpickle.com>]

The column name must be valid according to the type  specified for the comparator . 

>                 cannot parse ‘title’ as hex bytes.


Looks like you dont have a comparator type, so it defaulted to bytes.

You can either change the comparator *IF* all column names are strings or get the ascii code for "title" and use that. 

Cheers

-----------------
Aaron Morton
Freelance Developer
@aaronmorton
http://www.thelastpickle.com

On 21/08/2012, at 5:15 AM, "Ryabin, Thomas" <Th...@McKesson.com> wrote:

> I want to add a secondary index to an existing column family, but am running into some trouble. I’m trying to use the Cassandra CLI to add the secondary index. The column family is called “books”, the column I’m trying to index is called “title”, the key validation class is UTF8Type, and the default column value validator is BytesType.
>  
> I first tried running this command with no success:
> update column family books with column_metadata=[{column_name: title, index_type: KEYS}];
>  
> I got the error:
>                 cannot parse ‘title’ as hex bytes.
>  
>  
> I then tried running:
> update column family books with column_metadata=[{column_name: utf8(‘title’), index_type: KEYS}];
>  
> but got the error:
>                 cannot parse ‘FUNCTION_CALL’ as hex bytes
>  
>  
> Is there something I should be doing differently?
>  
> Thanks,
> Thomas
>                
>