It’s been a while since the last release of the cassandra-cql gem, and this version fixes a few long-standing encoding and data-access bugs as well as support for CQL3. The driver now also uses Travis for continuous integration.
The largest improvement is the ability to cast single columns at a time. One of the major pain points previously was that if a column in Cassandra had existing data and it’s validation changed to make that data invalid (empty string in an Integer-validated column for instance), none of the data in that row would be accessible as the entire row was casted at once. Each column is now individually casted and cached and if there is invalid data in a validated column, it will raise a CastException that contains a useful description of the problem as well as the bytes that raised the exception.
Another important bug fix is for character encoding in Ruby 1.9. The previous version incorrectly used ASCII-8BIT on data retrieved from ASCII-validated columns which when stored back into Cassandra, would encode it as binary. A simple change to US-ASCII in the casting has fixed that.
gem install cassandra-cql
Enjoy!
