In the patches that follow, we want Alternator to be able to use as a
key for a materialized view (GSI) not a real column from the schema,
but rather an attribute value deserialized from a member of the ":attrs"
map.
For this, we need the ability for materialized view to define a key
column which is computed as function of a real column (":attrs").
We already have an MV feature which we called "computed column"
(column_computation), but it is wholy inadequate for this job:
column_computation can only take a partition key, and produce a value -
while we need it to take a regular column (one member of ":attrs"),
not just the partition key, and return a cell - value or deletion,
timestamp and TTL.
So in this patch we introduce a new type of computed column, which we
called "regular_column_transformation" since it intends to perform some
sort of transformation on a single column (or more accurately, a single
atomic cell). The limitation that this function transforms a single
column only is important - if we had a function of multiple columns,
we wouldn't know which timestamp or ttl it should use for the result
if the two columns had different timestamps or TTLs.
The new class isn't wired to anything yet: The MV code cannot handle
it yet, and the Alternator code will not use it yet.
Signed-off-by: Nadav Har'El <nyh@scylladb.com>
c8ea9f8470