Configuring compression

Steps for configuring compression.

You configure a table property and subproperties to manage compression. The CQL table properties documentation describes the types of compression options that are available. Compression is enabled by default.

Procedure

  1. Disable compression, using CQL to set the compression parameter enabled to false.
    CREATE TABLE DogTypes (
                  block_id uuid,
                  species text,
                  alias text,
                  population varint,
                  PRIMARY KEY (block_id)
                )
                WITH compression = { 'enabled' : false };
  2. Enable compression on an existing table, using ALTER TABLE to set the compression algorithm class to LZ4Compressor (Cassandra 1.2.2 and later), SnappyCompressor, or DeflateCompressor.
    CREATE TABLE DogTypes (
                  block_id uuid,
                  species text,
                  alias text,
                  population varint,
                  PRIMARY KEY (block_id)
                )
                WITH compression = { 'class' : 'LZ4Compressor' };
  3. Change compression on an existing table, using ALTER TABLE and setting the compression algorithm class to DeflateCompressor.
    ALTER TABLE CatTypes
      WITH compression = { 'class' : 'DeflateCompressor', 'chunk_length_in_kb' : 64 }
    You tune data compression on a per-table basis using CQL to alter a table.