[grizzles]

Sure, would you mind showing me how to use CQL to insert data into an old-school style Column Family that was created with the Thrift interface? Linus Torvalds would be up in arms if he saw this kind of client facing API breakage.

[iamaleksey]

CQL is compatible with Thrift-created column families (the inverse is not true, though). Just do a DESCRIBE SCHEMA from cqlsh and see how CQL interprets a particular Thrift-created column family, then use regular INSERTs.