Learning Apache Cassandra - Second Edition

Structured records

The first three database features we looked at are commonly found in distributed data stores. However, databases such as Riak and Voldemort are purely key value stores; these databases have no knowledge of the internal structure of a record that's stored in a particular key. This means useful functions such as updating only part of a record, reading only certain fields from a record, or retrieving records that contain a particular value in a given field are not possible.

Relational databases such as PostgreSQL, document stores such as MongoDB, and, to a limited extent, newer key-value stores such as Redis, do have a concept of the internal structure of their records, and most application developers are accustomed to taking ...