Is it possible to drop a column from AWS Keyspaces table?

Question

I need to write roll-in and roll-back scripts for AWS Keyspaces. Roll-in is

ALTER TABLE my_table ADD (
  next_value_1 double,
  next_value_2 double,
);

What roll-back script should be? According to what's written at Tutorial: Delete data in an Amazon Keyspaces table I can't drop columns from a table.

You can delete a column from a specific row, individual rows from a table, all the rows from a table, an entire table, or a keyspace.

Also there's no ALTER TABLE xxx DROP () mentions in DDL statements page.

Is there any way to do this?

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Jan 11 '22 at 14:29

It looks like you cannot. From the doc mentioned in the original post, the supported syntax is:

ALTER TABLE table_name    

    [ ADD ( column_definition | column_definition_list)  ] 
    [[ADD | DROP] TAGS {'key1':'val1', 'key2':'val2'}]            
    [ WITH table_options [ , ... ] ] ;

It looks like you can ADD and DROP tags, but you can only ADD columns. If you need to DROP a column, it looks like you'll have to recreate the table.

Despite how AWS Keyspaces is touted as a drop-in replacement for Cassandra, there are many things that it simply does not support.

Note that ALTER TABLE table_name DROP column_name does indeed work in both Apache Cassandra and DataStax Astra DB.

Is it possible to drop a column from AWS Keyspaces table?

1 Answers1