Show cassandra help documentation in terminal instead of browser

I used in my example situation Hector Object Mapping, HOM also for creation of the database from scratch. This was not a good idea, because everything was handled as bytes, like they normally are, and no instructions about how to interpret them was thus given.

Solution to this was to use cqlsh client and give there CQL queries to add tables. So, I made queries like:

CREATE COLUMNFAMILY users (KEY varchar PRIMARY KEY, password varchar);

and with these the remarkable thing is the explicit type (varchar for password) that was given to each column. Now, on the very same tool, data was interpreted as I wanted.

See also:

More info in Getting started with CQL page.

Also see CQL Language Reference for more information e.g. about available datatypes other than varchar mentioned before.

Your understanding is correct that beyond the default 3 hours, hints are no longer stored. This is to avoid overloading the other alive nodes for prolonged period of time.

If any node happens to be down for a longer period than the hint_window, its absolutely necessary to rebuild the node or even remove all the files from its data directory and let it bootstrap as a brand new node. You may have to use replace_address if you are bringing up the same node.