Learning Apache Cassandra - Second Edition

The wide row data structure

Another important observation is that, at the column family level, there is no preset list of allowed cell names. The cell names we observe in alice's partition of the home_status_updates column family are derived partially from data calculated at runtime-namely, the UUID values of various status update ID columns. At the CQL level, tables must have predefined column names but no equivalent restriction exists at the column family level.

Looking closely at the cells in alice's RowKey, we observe that they are in order: first, descending by the timestamp encoded in the UUID component of the cell name, and second, alphabetically ascending by the column name component. You learned in Chapter 3, Organizing Related Data ...