Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Viewing a table schema in cqlsh
In this chapter, we'll be working with the
users
table, which we haven't had much inter-
action with since the early chapters. Before we start making changes to the
users
table, it
would be helpful to have a reminder of what its schema looks like.
One option would be to simply issue a
SELECT
statement and look at the row headers;
however,
cqlsh
gives us a more elegant way to view the schema, namely, the
DESCRIBE
TABLE
statement:
DESCRIBE TABLE "users";
The output is a
CREATE TABLE
statement showing the table's schema as well as all prop-
erties for the table:
The part of the output beginning with
WITH
tells us the table properties for the
users
table; in this case, the properties are all set to their default values. We can ignore this part
of the output as working with table properties goes beyond the scope of this topic.
The important part of the output is at the top, listing the columns in the table and telling us
which comprise the primary key. We're now reminded that the
users
table has the
user-
name
column as its primary key, and
email
and
encrypted_password
are data
columns in the table.
