Statements

Quick overview

What you pass to session.execute().

  • three types: simple (textual query), bound (prepared) and batch.
  • built-in implementations are immutable. Setters always return a new object, don’t ignore the result.

To execute a CQL query, you create a Statement instance and pass it to Session#execute or Session#executeAsync. The driver provides various implementations:

  • SimpleStatement: a simple implementation built directly from a character string. Typically used for queries that are executed only once or a few times.
  • BoundStatement (from PreparedStatement): obtained by binding values to a prepared query. Typically used for queries that are executed often, with different values.
  • BatchStatement: a statement that groups multiple statements to be executed as a batch.

All statement types share a common set of execution attributes, that can be set through either setters or a builder:

When setting these attributes, keep in mind that statements are immutable, and every method returns a different instance:

SimpleStatement statement =
    SimpleStatement.newInstance("SELECT release_version FROM system.local");

// Won't work: statement isn't modified in place
statement.setConfigProfileName("oltp");
statement.setIdempotent(true);

// Instead, reassign the statement every time:
statement = statement.setConfigProfileName("oltp").setIdempotent(true);

All of these mutating methods are annotated with @CheckReturnValue. Some code analysis tools – such as ErrorProne – can check correct usage at build time, and report mistakes as compiler errors.

Note that some attributes can either be set programmatically, or inherit a default value defined in the configuration. Namely, these are: idempotent flag, query timeout, consistency levels and page size. We recommended the configuration approach whenever possible (you can create execution profiles to capture common combinations of those options).