Blob

Cassandra 1.2.3 still supports blobs as string constants for input (to allow smoother transition to blob constant). Blobs as strings are now deprecated and will not be supported in the near future. If you were using strings as blobs, update your client code to switch to blob constants. A blob constant is an hexadecimal number defined by 0[xX](hex)+ where hex is an hexadecimal character, such as [0-9a-fA-F]. For example, 0xcafe.

Blob conversion functions 

A number of functions convert the native types into binary data (blob). For every <native-type> nonblob type supported by CQL3, the typeAsBlob function takes a argument of type type and returns it as a blob. Conversely, the blobAsType function takes a 64-bit blob argument and converts it to a bigint value. For example, bigintAsBlob(3) is 0x0000000000000003 and blobAsBigint(0x0000000000000003) is 3.