Cassandra CQL3 conditional insert/update

Question

I have a list of unordered events and my task is to store first and last occurrences for them.

I have following column family in Cassandra:

CREATE TABLE events (
   event_name TEXT,
   first_occurrence BIGINT,
   last_occurrence BIGINT,
   PRIMARY KEY (event_name)
);

So if I have an event with the name "some_event" and occurrence with 123456, what I want to do is something which in MySQL terms would look like this:

INSERT INTO events (event_name, first_occurence, last_occurence)
VALUES ('some_event', 123456, 123456)
ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE 
     first_occurrence = LEAST(first_occurrence, 12345), 
     last_occurrence = GREATEST(last_occurrence, 123456)

I was going to use lightweight transactions in Cassandra to accomplish it, like this:

INSERT INTO events(event_name, first_occurrence, last_occurrence) VALUES ('some_event', 12345, 12345) IF NOT EXISTS;
UPDATE events SET first_occurrence = 123456 WHERE event_name='some_event' IF first_occurrence > 123456;
UPDATE events SET last_occurrence = 123456 WHERE event_name='some_event' IF last_occurrence < 123456;

But as it turns out, CQL3 does not allow < and > operators in lightweight transactions IF clause.

So my question is, what is the pattern for doing such conditional updates?

Answer 1

What version of cassandra are you running? Support for non-equal conditions with LWTs was added in 2.1.1 via CASSANDRA-6839:

cqlsh:test> UPDATE events SET first_occurrence = 123456 WHERE event_name='some_event' IF first_occurrence > 1;

[applied]
-----------
  True