Frequently asked questions

I'm modifying a statement and the changes get ignored, why?

In driver 4, statement classes are immutable. All mutating methods return a new instance, so make sure you don't accidentally ignore their result:

BoundStatement boundSelect = preparedSelect.bind();

// This doesn't work: setInt and setPageSize don't modify boundSelect in place:
boundSelect.setInt("k", key);
boundSelect.setPageSize(1000);
session.execute(boundSelect);

// Instead, reassign the statement every time:
boundSelect = boundSelect.setInt("k", key).setPageSize(1000);

All of these mutating methods are annotated with @CheckReturnValue. Some code analysis tools -- such as ErrorProne -- can check correct usage at build time, and report mistakes as compiler errors.

The driver also provides builders:

BoundStatement boundSelect =
    preparedSelect.boundStatementBuilder()
        .setInt("k", key)
        .setPageSize(1000)
        .build();

Why do asynchronous methods return `CompletionStage<T>` instead of `CompletableFuture<T>`?

Because it's the right abstraction to use. A completable future, as its name indicates, is a future that can be completed manually; that is not what we want to return from our API: the driver completes the futures, not the user.

Also, CompletionStage does not expose a get() method; one can view that as an encouragement to use a fully asynchronous programming model (chaining callbacks instead of blocking for a result).

At any rate, CompletionStage has a toCompletableFuture() method. In current JDK versions, every CompletionStage is a CompletableFuture, so the conversion has no performance overhead.

Where is `DowngradingConsistencyRetryPolicy`?

That retry policy was deprecated in driver 3.5.0, and does not exist anymore in 4.0.0. The main motivation is that this behavior should be the application's concern, not the driver's.

We recognize that there are use cases where downgrading is good -- for instance, a dashboard application would present the latest information by reading at QUORUM, but it's acceptable for it to display stale information by reading at ONE sometimes.

But APIs provided by the driver should instead encourage idiomatic use of a distributed system like Apache Cassandra, and a downgrading policy works against this. It suggests that an anti-pattern such as "try to read at QUORUM, but fall back to ONE if that fails" is a good idea in general use cases, when in reality it provides no better consistency guarantees than working directly at ONE, but with higher latencies.

We therefore urge users to carefully choose upfront the consistency level that works best for their use cases. If there is a legitimate reason to downgrade and retry, that should be handled by the application code.

I want to set a date on a bound statement, where did `setTimestamp()` go?

The driver now uses Java 8's improved date and time API. CQL type timestamp is mapped to java.time.Instant, and the corresponding getter and setter are getInstant and setInstant.

See Temporal types for more details.