Is there an ENUM datatype in Cassandra? For example, using a pseudo-CQL language:
CREATE ENUM MovieGenre (Comedy, Romance, Fantasy, SciFi)
Then use it as:
INSERT INTO myMovie (movieid, name, genre) VALUES (124-abcd, 'The Enum Story', MovieGenre.SciFi);
The idea is to use a more compact encoding of the values and avoid unintended creation of new values because of typos or case sensitivity.