Cassandra "no viable alternative at input"

Question

I am trying to insert a simple row into the table. Can someone point out what is happening here ?

CREATE TABLE recommendation_engine_poc.user_by_category (         game_category text,         customer_id text,         amount double,         game_date timestamp,         PRIMARY KEY (game_category, customer_id)     ) WITH CLUSTERING ORDER BY (customer_id ASC)         AND bloom_filter_fp_chance = 0.01         AND caching = '{"keys":"ALL", "rows_per_partition":"NONE"}'         AND comment = ''         AND compaction = {'class': 'org.apache.cassandra.db.compaction.SizeTieredCompactionStrategy'}         AND compression = {'sstable_compression': 'org.apache.cassandra.io.compress.LZ4Compressor'}         AND dclocal_read_repair_chance = 0.1         AND default_time_to_live = 0         AND gc_grace_seconds = 864000         AND max_index_interval = 2048         AND memtable_flush_period_in_ms = 0         AND min_index_interval = 128         AND read_repair_chance = 0.0         AND speculative_retry = '99.0PERCENTILE';      cqlsh:recommendation_engine_poc> insert into user_by_category  ('game_category','customer_id') VALUES ('Goku','12') ;     SyntaxException: <ErrorMessage code=2000 [Syntax error in CQL query] message="line 1:31 no viable alternative at input 'game_category' (insert into user_by_category  (['game_categor]...)"> 

Answer 1

Wrong syntax. Here you are:

insert into user_by_category (game_category,customer_id) VALUES ('Goku','12');

or:

insert into user_by_category ("game_category","customer_id") VALUES ('Kakarot','12');

The second one is normally used for case-sensitive column names.

Answer 2

When using placeholders (either for preparing a statement, or just to use a dict for populating values), there is another problem that can occur: whatever you put into the dict might not evaluate into a simple type like int, str etc. For me this happened with the IntEnum, which appeared as <MyIntEnum.CONSTANT: 4> instead of 4, but it can happen with any complex object which will then appear like <object object at 0x7fbf08a0bdf0>.

So if you use the form:

session.execute(         INSERT INTO table (id, name)         VALUES (%(id)s, %(name)s),         {"id": 123456, "name": "example"} ) 

make sure that everything in your dict is actually a string, int, float etc.

That was not the problem in this question, but since it's another wrong encoding and this is the first Google hit for the question I hope this helps someone :)