[Solved] Are CQL list values really limited to 65535 bytes?

Question

The documentation here is wrong as far as I understand it. That limitation was changed in protocol version 3 (introduced in C* 2.1). From the native protocol specification under the changes section for protocol 3:

The serialization format for collection has changed (both the collection size and
the length of each argument is now 4 bytes long). See Section 6.

So as long as you use protocol version 3 or higher, you can create lists with as many as 2^31-1 bytes (2147483647) or elements.

Edit: I just noticed your comment about set identity, that may be a limitation of the storage engine itself, so perhaps the documentation was left this way for that reason, but the protocol itself supports larger collections now. Will pursue seeing if we can document that nuance.

Accepted Answer

The documentation here is wrong as far as I understand it. That limitation was changed in protocol version 3 (introduced in C* 2.1). From the native protocol specification under the changes section for protocol 3:

The serialization format for collection has changed (both the collection size and
the length of each argument is now 4 bytes long). See Section 6.

So as long as you use protocol version 3 or higher, you can create lists with as many as 2^31-1 bytes (2147483647) or elements.

Edit: I just noticed your comment about set identity, that may be a limitation of the storage engine itself, so perhaps the documentation was left this way for that reason, but the protocol itself supports larger collections now. Will pursue seeing if we can document that nuance.