Identifiers are used to refer to objects exposed by the driver, such as tables and columns. The driver supports both quoted and unquoted identifiers for naming objects. The maximum length of both quoted and unquoted identifiers is 48 characters for table names and 128 characters for column names. Quoted identifiers must be enclosed in double quotation marks (""). The characters supported in quoted identifiers depends on the version of Cassandra being used. For details on valid characters, refer to the Cassandra documentation for your database version.

Naming conflicts can arise from restrictions imposed by third party applications, from the normalization of native data, or from the truncation of object names. The driver avoids naming conflicts by appending an underscore separator and integer (for example, _1) to identifiers with the same name. For example, if a third party application restricts the naming of three columns such that each column retains the name address, the driver would expose the columns in the following manner:

  • address
  • address_1
  • address_2