Cassandra CLI: specify name of primary key

Question

Is it possible to specify a name of primary key via cassandra CLI, like via CQL:

create columnfamily test (
  my_key_name varchar primary key,
  value varchar);

By default, cassandra cli creates primary key with name 'KEY'

Answer 1

The attribute you're looking for is key_alias. Unfortunately, you can't currently set it through cassandra-cli, only cqlsh. I've opened CASSANDRA-4158 to fix this.

Answer 2

When creating or updating a column family via the CLI, you can specify the column_metadata to identify the type (validation class) and/or if the column has an index. e.g., assuming you have created the test column family, and wish to specify the column my_key_name as string type which is indexed:

update column family test
 with column_metadata =
  [
   {column_name: 'my_key_name', validation_class: UTF8Type, index_type: KEYS}
  ];

if you wanted to later drop the index

update column family test with column_metadata = [];

Answer 3

Here is a CQL example from a Cassandra 1.1 schema related blog post on the Datastax website http://www.datastax.com/dev/blog/schema-in-cassandra-1-1

CREATE TABLE users (
    id uuid PRIMARY KEY,
    name varchar,
    state varchar
);

I have used only 0.7.x where you can specify the data type of the key. Following is from 0.7.6 cassandra-cli "help assume;" command

assume <column_family> keys as <type>;

Assume one of the attributes (comparator, sub_comparator, validator or keys)
of the given column family to match specified type. Available types: bytes, integer, long, lexicaluuid, timeuuid, utf8, ascii.