Iterating through Cassandra wide row with CQL3

Question

How can I pull in a range of Composite columns with CQL3?

Consider the following:

CREATE TABLE Stuff (
    a int,
    b text,
    c text,
    d text,
    PRIMARY KEY (a,b,c)
);

In Cassandra what this effectively does is creates a ColumnFamily with integer rows (values of a) and with CompositeColumns composed of the values of b and c and the literal string 'd'. Of course this is all covered up by CQL3 so that we will think that we're inserting into individual database rows... but I digress.

And consider the following set of inputs:

INSERT INTO Stuff (a,b,c,d) VALUES (1,'A','P','whatever0');
INSERT INTO Stuff (a,b,c,d) VALUES (1,'A','Q','whatever1');
INSERT INTO Stuff (a,b,c,d) VALUES (1,'A','R','whatever2');
INSERT INTO Stuff (a,b,c,d) VALUES (1,'A','S','whatever3');
INSERT INTO Stuff (a,b,c,d) VALUES (1,'A','T','whatever4');
INSERT INTO Stuff (a,b,c,d) VALUES (1,'B','P','whatever5');
INSERT INTO Stuff (a,b,c,d) VALUES (1,'B','Q','whatever6');
INSERT INTO Stuff (a,b,c,d) VALUES (1,'B','R','whatever7');
INSERT INTO Stuff (a,b,c,d) VALUES (1,'B','S','whatever8');
INSERT INTO Stuff (a,b,c,d) VALUES (1,'B','T','whatever9');

In my current use case, I want to read all of the values of Stuff, n values at a time. How do I do this? Here's my current take using n=4:

SELECT * FROM Stuff WHERE a=1 LIMIT 4;

And as expected I get:

 a | b | c | d
---+---+---+-----------
 1 | A | P | whatever0
 1 | A | Q | whatever1
 1 | A | R | whatever2
 1 | A | S | whatever3

The trouble that I run into is how do I get the next 4? Here is my attempt:

SELECT * FROM Stuff WHERE a=1 AND b='A' AND c>'S' LIMIT 4;

This doesn't work because we've constrained b to equal 'A' - which is a reasonable thing to do! But I've found nothing in the CQL3 syntax that allows me to keep iterating anyway. I wish I could do something like:

SELECT * FROM Stuff WHERE a=1 AND {b,c} > {'A','S'} LIMIT 4;

How do I achieve my desired result. Namely, how do I make CQL3 return:

 a | b | c | d
---+---+---+-----------
 1 | A | T | whatever0
 1 | B | P | whatever1
 1 | B | Q | whatever2
 1 | B | R | whatever3

Answer 1

Auto paging is done https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-4415, it's release to Cassandra 2.0.1