Schemafull CRUD

Now that we’ve learned how to define both tables and fields, It’s time for some schemafull CRUD.

In this lesson, we’ll only cover what is different from schemaless CRUD, namely how to update the schema and data for tables and fields using:

• The FIELD clause on the REMOVE statement
• The OVERWRITE clause on the DEFINE statement
• The ALTER statement

Adding and removing fields

When updating our schemaless tables, we could just SET or UNSET fields and they would appear.

UPDATE product:01FSXKCPVR8G1TVYFT4JFJS5WB
SET new_field = "why not?";

UPDATE product UNSET category;

Now if we try to do that, we’ll see that the first UPDATE query which tries to SET a new field on our product table, appears to succeed, but our new field is nowhere to be found as it was dropped because it was not a part of the schema. We would first need to define the new field before creating it.

For our second UPDATE query which tries to UNSET the category field on our product table, we also get a schema error.

REMOVE FIELD category ON TABLE product;

SELECT category from product limit 1;

UPDATE product;

SELECT * from product limit 1;

In order to remove a field from our schemafull table, we first need to use the REMOVE FIELD statement.

However, that is not enough to actually remove the field data, as the REMOVE FIELD statement only removes the schema definition.

Once the schema definition is removed, we can use UNSET like for we did earlier.

There is however another way, if removing multiple fields, we can simply run UPDATE product and the UPDATE statement will remove anything that is no longer a part of the schema definition.

Updating fields and tables

-- Change from a generic number type to float
DEFINE FIELD OVERWRITE price ON TABLE product TYPE float;

-- Change from schemafull to schemaless
DEFINE TABLE OVERWRITE product TYPE NORMAL SCHEMALESS;

-- Change again from schemaless to schemafull
ALTER TABLE product SCHEMAFULL;

For updating existing schema definitions there are two options:

• The OVERWRITE clause on the DEFINE statement
• The ALTER statement

For example, we can change the datatype of a field or change a table from schemafull to schemaless.

The difference between these two options is that

• DEFINE ... OVERWRITE can be used to both create new definitions and update existing ones, but needs to include the entire definition.
• The ALTER statement only updates existing definitions and only needs to include the items to be updated, not the entire definition.

Summary

Let’s summarise what we’ve learned

When adding and removing fields

• You need to use DEFINE FIELD to add the field to the schema before using UPDATE to add the data.
• You need to use REMOVE FIELD to remove the field from the schema before using UPDATE to remove the data.

When updating fields and tables

• DEFINE ... OVERWRITE can be used to both create new definitions and update existing ones, but needs to include the entire definition.
• The ALTER statement only updates existing definitions and only needs to include the items to be updated, not the entire definition.

That’s it for this part on making our data schemafull, in the next part, we’ll explore how to make our data secure.