The distance of an host influence how much connections are kept to the node (see HostDistance). A policy should assign a * LOCAL distance to nodes that are susceptible to be returned first by newQueryPlan and it is useless for newQueryPlan to return hosts to which it assigns an IGNORED distance.

The host distance is primarily used to prevent keeping too many connections to host in remote datacenters when the policy itself always picks host in the local datacenter first.

Note that the driver guarantees that it will call this method exactly once per policy object and will do so before any call to another of the methods of the policy.

Each new query will call this method. The first host in the result will then be used to perform the query. In the event of a connection problem (the queried host is down or appear to be so), the next host will be used. If all hosts of the returned Iterator are down, the query will fail.