Is it possible to update one value and delete another one by a single Cassandra CQL query?

Question

Given a table:

CREATE TABLE t (
    k text,
    v1 int,
    v2 int,
    PRIMARY KEY (k)
)

Is it possible to set v1 to some value and delete (set to null) v2 with a single query? Something like:

UPDATE t SET v1=100, v2=NULL WHERE k='somekey';

I have looked through the docs, but found nothing.

It would be a nice to have feature for two reasons:

• Updating a table with a lots of columns using prepared statements is really painful now.
• If my understanding is correct, row update by a single query should be atomic, whereas there are no guarantees for two consequent queries.

Answer 1

The query you suggested works (at least) in CQL3:

cqlsh:ks> UPDATE t SET v1=100, v2=NULL WHERE k='somekey';
cqlsh:ks> select * from t;

 k       | v1  | v2
---------+-----+------
 somekey | 100 | null

If you want to do more complicated atomic updates e.g. across different row keys or column families, you can wrap separate UPDATEs in BEGIN BATCH...APPLY BATCH.