Prettifying results of cqlsh commands in Linux terminal

Question

Is there any way to prettify the results of cql commands in the Linux terminal while using the cqlsh utility (cql version of Mongo .pretty())? It becomes quite difficult to read the results when the output is displayed normally, especially when there are nested documents and arrays

Answer 1

Perhaps you are interested in the EXPAND command?

Usage: EXPAND ON;

From the documentation over at Datastax:

This command lists the contents of each row of a table vertically, providing a more convenient way to read long rows of data than the default horizontal format. You scroll down to see more of the row instead of scrolling to the right. Each column name appears on a separate line in column one and the values appear in column two.

Source: https://docs.datastax.com/en/dse/5.1/cql/cql/cql_reference/cqlsh_commands/cqlshExpand.html

Answer 2

cqlsh is a python script that uses the datastax python-driver to make queries to cassandra. You can modify the script to meet your needs (see: Why does cqlsh right-align strings? for an example), or you can write a program using the python-driver or another library to do what you need.

Since mongo is document-oriented, it makes sense that pretty-printing is an available option. However cassandra is more columnar / row-oriented so you don't typically look at result sets like documents, instead you look at them more like rows, although I do see the utility in a 'pretty-print' like function.