Upgrade guide

DSE and OSS drivers have been unified

As of the 4.4.0 release of the DataStax Node.js Driver for Apache Cassandra® (OSS Driver), the DataStax Enterprise Node.js Driver (DSE driver) functionality has been merged into a single DataStax driver. Please refer to the blog post for more information on this change.

The purpose of this guide is to detail the changes made by the successive versions of the DataStax Node.js Driver that are relevant to for an upgrade from prior versions.

If you have any questions or comments, you can post them on the mailing list.

2.2

Tuple constructor with one parameter

The Tuple constructor had an undocumented behaviour when invoked with a single parameter which was an Array, the driver used the Array instance as Tuple elements. We removed this behaviour that was used internally. Tuple.fromArray() method should be used to build a Tuple from an Array of elements.

2.0

The following is a list of changes made in version 2.0 of the driver that are relevant when upgrading from version 1.x.

localDataCenter is now a required Client option

When using DseLoadBalancingPolicy, which is used by default, or DCAwareRoundRobinPolicy a local data center must now be provided to the Client options parameter as localDataCenter. This is necessary to prevent routing requests to nodes in remote data centers unintentionally.

Removed createAsAWrapper() method from DseLoadBalancingPolicy class

Previously, we supported the use of the DseLoadBalancingPolicy as a wrapper of a child policy. The new implementation of the DseLoadBalancingPolicy provides replica ordering using “Power of Two Random Choices” algorithm and removes the possibility of chaining policies.

Selection of contact points is now evaluated in random order

The list of contact points provided as a Client option is now shuffled before selecting a node to connect to as part of initialization. This change was made for instances where configuration is shared between many clients. In this case, it is better to distribute initial connections to different nodes in the cluster instead of choosing the same node each time as the initial connection makes a number of queries to discover cluster topology and schema.

Changes to the retry and load-balancing policies

ExecutionOptions is introduced as a wrapper around the QueryOptions. The ExecutionOptions contains getter methods to obtain the values of each option, defaulting to the execution profile options or the ones defined in the ClientOptions. Previously, a shallow copy of the provided QueryOptions was used, resulting in unnecessary allocations and evaluations.

The LoadBalancingPolicy and RetryPolicy base classes changed method signatures to take ExecutionOptions instances as argument instead of QueryOptions.

Note that no breaking change was introduced for execution methods such as Client#execute(), Client#batch(), Client#eachRow() and Client#stream(). This change only affects custom implementations of the policies.

Query idempotency and retries

The configured RetryPolicy is not engaged when a query errors with a WriteTimeoutException or request error and the query was not idempotent.

In order to control the possibility of retrying when an timeout/error is encountered, you must mark the query as idempotent. You can define it at QueryOptions level when calling the execution methods.

client.execute(query, params, { prepare: true, isIdempotent: true })

Additionally, you can define the default idempotence for all executions when creating the Client instance:

const client = new Client({
  contactPoints,
  localDataCenter,
  queryOptions: { isIdempotent: true }
});

Previously, a similar behaviour was available using IdempotenceAwareRetryPolicy, that is now marked as deprecated.

Removed retryOnTimeout property of QueryOptions

retryOnTimeout, the property that controlled whether a request should be tried when a response wasn’t obtained after a period of time is no longer available.

The behaviour should be now controlled using onRequestError() method on the RetryPolicy for idempotent queries.

Changes on OperationInfo of the retry module

The retry policy methods takes OperationInfo as a parameter. Some OperationInfo properties changes or were removed.

  • Deprecated properties handler, request and retryOnTimeout were removed.
  • options property was replaced by executionOptions which is an instance of ExecutionOptions.

Removed meta property from ResultSet

On earlier versions of the driver, the ResultSet exposed the property meta which contained the raw result metadata. This property was removed in the latest version.

Removed DCAwareRoundRobinPolicy usedHostsPerRemoteDC constructor parameter

DCAwareRoundRobinPolicy no longer supports routing queries to hosts in remote data centers. Because of this usedHostsPerRemoteDC has been removed as a constructor parameter. This change was made because handling data center outages is better suited at a service level rather than within an application client.

Kerberos optional dependency bumped to 1.0+

The driver supports GSSAPI authentication using kerberos library, the minimum version requirement for the kerberos library is 1.0.0.