What’s New in Cassandra 2.2: JSON Support

Cassandra 2.2 introduces an extension to CQL that makes working with JSON documents easier. The SELECT and INSERT statements now include a JSON-focused variant, and two new native functions have been added for conversion between JSON and other formats. This feature ensures users continue to work with data in a type-safe, schema-enforced way. Cassandra types that have a sensible native JSON equivalent are accepted, while those without clear equivalents require string representations matching the normal CQL literal format. Lists, sets, tuples, and user-defined types can be represented by JSON maps or lists. The SELECT statement has also been extended to support retrieval of rows in a JSON-encoded map format. Additionally, new functions toJson() and fromJson() have been introduced for single column operations. Overall, these improvements make it easier to work with JSON documents while maintaining the benefits of schema enforcement.