How to rename table in Cassandra CQL3

Question

I'm trying to rename table created via CQLSH. E.g. rename table "AAA" to "BBB". Can't find any command to do so. Any ideas?

Using [cqlsh 3.1.6 | Cassandra 1.2.8 | CQL spec 3.0.0 | Thrift protocol 19.36.0]

Delao

Answer 1

I don't believe you can rename tables or keyspaces, there's no CQL3 operation to do it, and nothing in the old Thirft interfaces either, if I remember correctly.

One reason why you can't is that it would be an extremely hard thing for Cassandra to do due to its distributed nature, the change can't be done atomically so the cluster would be in an inconsistent state, and most likely updates would be lost. It's similar to creating and dropping tables, but in those cases it's expected that updates will be lost if they're issued before the table is created or after it has been dropped.

The only way that I know of to do what you ask is to create the new table and move all the data from the old to the new, then drop the old table. There might be a way to do it without moving the data, but it would probably require you to stop the cluster and change the name of all directories and files belonging to the table, and also change the metadata in the system.schema_columnfamilies table (but I'm not sure you can even do that).

Departmentalize

vkroz: did you try the above solution? – Mallissa

How about a way to copy one table to another? – Wakerife

I know this is hold but just in case the next person stumbles on it... The best way to insert data from one table into another is to export the data then import it into the next table. If you are renaming a table, you would do the export, create the new table, then import the data. You can delete the old table anytime after the export. docs.datastax.com/en/cql/3.1/cql/cql_reference/copy_r.html – Fealty