Apache Cassandra : Key auto increment

Question

I started with Cassandra. I use cql 2.0 and I would like to create table with primary key auto_increment. I use cassandra on one node.

Answer 1

Cassandra doesn't have any type of key auto increment feature that you would normally find in an RDBMS. The coordination cost across nodes is too high to make it a worthwhile feature.

Generally you should be using UUIDs whenever you would have used an auto incrementing sequence in an RDBMS. Clients can create these independently of each other with a guarantee of uniqueness (if you are using them correctly). You can use TimeUUIDs if you want to be able to order your keys by creation time (assuming that your clients have synchronized clocks).

You said you are only using a 1 node cluster. If you don't ever plan on growing your cluster to be larger than 1 node then I would suggest using a different database. Cassandra sacrifices many of the traditional database features to make it work really well distributed across a ring of machines. When you only run a single node cluster you lose all of the nice features from an RDMBS without gaining any of the benefits of running a multinode Cassandra cluster.