Re: Cassandra upgrade to 5

Hello Rene,

Thanks for taking care of the work.

> - dropping the compression, thinking it's not a big deal and documenting
how to add manually those compressions to the tables on cassandra via
cqlsh commands.

+1 for me.

Regards,

Quan

On Fri, Aug 1, 2025 at 3:53 PM Rene Cordier <[email protected]> wrote:

> Hello everybody,
>
> I've been tinkering around trying to upgrade to Cassandra 5 in James
> code to validate the compatibility with James.
>
> You can find a JIRA ticket:
> https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/JAMES-4142
>
> And the PR attempt: https://github.com/apache/james-project/pull/2780
>
> Latest build was green.
>
> Minimal changes honestly, except one rather odd. We use actually
> compression options on the following 4 tables:
>
> - blob_cache
> - mailbox
> - imapUidTable
> - message_fast_view_projection
>
> Problem is: there is a hard breaking change in Cassandra 5.0 where a
> compression option changes name from `check_length_kb` to
> `check_length_in_kb`.
>
> The java driver for cassandra of course can't deal with this at the moment.
>
> A fix was made and should be part of the next release of the java
> driver: https://github.com/apache/cassandra-java-driver/pull/2029
>
> But... it introduces different methods to manage retro compatibility
> (which isn't great).
>
>  From there we are thinking:
>
> - introducing an option in the configuration to determine if Cassandra 4
> or 5 and then select the proper method when we get the new driver
> released (which I'm unsure when will that happen)
> - dropping the compression, thinking it's not a big deal and documenting
> how to add manually those compressions to the tables on cassandra via
> cqlsh commands.
>
> We think the second option is the simplest and probably better here,
> this is the way the PR has taken by the way. But it deserves a wider
> discussion with the community in general (thus the thread).
>
> Note as well that existing setups will be migrated without issues for
> those compression options when upgrading the cluster from cassandra 4 to
> 5. This is just an issue for new setups.
>
> What do people think?
>
> Thank you all and wishing you a good summer holiday as well!
>
> Rene.
>
>
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