Cassandra bulk insert operation, internally

Question

I am looking for Cassandra/CQL's cousin of the common SQL idiom of INSERT INTO ... SELECT ... FROM ... and have been unable to find anything to do such an operation programmatically or in CQL. Is it just not supported?

My use case is to do a reasonably bulky copy from one table to another. I don't need any particular concurrent guarantees, but it's a lot of data so I'd like to avoid the additional network overhead of writing a client that retrieves data from one table, then issues batches of inserts into the other table. I understand that the changes will still need to be transported between nodes of the Cassandra cluster according to the replication set-up, but it seems reasonable for there to be an "internal" option to do a bulk operation from one table to another. Is there such a thing in CQL or elsewhere? I'm currently using Hector to talk to Cassandra.

Edit: it looks like sstableloader might be relevant, but is awfully low-level for something that I'd expect to be a fairly common use case. Taking just a subset of rows from one table to another also seems less than trivial in that framework.

Answer 1

Correct, this is not supported natively. (Another alternative would be a map/reduce job.) Cassandra's API focuses on short requests for applications at scale, not batch or analytical queries.