They changed the way that columns are specified in schema_columns, such that each column now has a type field that specifies whether a column is primary or not, and the query that was here previously doesn't distinguish between primary and normal columns. This causes the query above to return an incorrect number of columns, and causes the FirstModel test to fail. As we can't detect the C* version at runtime due to their being no global version variable, we need to make a generic query (as the previous query returned too many columns, and a new query would be backwards incompatible), and detect by parsing the results. 'regular' columns are the columns that you assume are returned by your query.