Looks like there is a bug where you cannot read a counter from the jdbc cql driver.
it appears on line #36 in src/java/org/apache/cassandra/cql/jdbc/TypesMap.java (notice it's in the portion of code that sits in the main src dir not the drivers) map.put("org.apache.cassandra.db.marshal.ColumnCounterType", JdbcCounterColumn.instance); should be map.put("org.apache.cassandra.db.marshal.CounterColumnType",JdbcCounterColumn.instance); I'm not subscribed to this mailing list so please cc me. Thanks, -Corey