Does CQL3 require a schema for Cassandra now?

Question

I\'ve just had a crash course of Cassandra over the last week and went from Thrift API to CQL to grokking SuperColumns to learning I shouldn\'t use them and user Composite Keys

Answer 1

Yes, CQL3 does require columns to be declared before used.

But, you can do as many ALTERs as you want, no locking or performance hit is entailed.

That said, most of the places that you'd use "dynamic columns" in earlier C* versions are better served by a Map in C* 1.2.