How to fetch Primary Key/Clustering column names for a particular table using CQL statements?

Question

I am trying to fetch the Primary Key/Clustering Key names for a particular table/entity and implement the same query in my JPA interface (which extends CassandraRepository). I am not sure whether something like:

@Query("DESCRIBE TABLE <table_name>)
public Object describeTbl();

would work here as describe isn't a valid CQL statement and in case it would, what would be the type of the Object?

Suggestions?

Answer 1

One thing you could try, would be to query the system_schema.columns table. It is keyed by keyspace_name and table_name, and might be what you're looking for here:

> SELECT column_name,kind FROM system_schema.columns
  WHERE keyspace_name='spaceflight_data'
  AND table_name='astronauts_by_group';

 column_name       | kind
-------------------+---------------
           flights |       regular
             group | partition_key
              name |    clustering
 spaceflight_hours |    clustering

(4 rows)