Learning Apache Cassandra - Second Edition

Map columns in column families

Although maps might seem like the most complex of the three collection column types, their column family level representation is actually simpler than that of lists, so we'll save lists for last. To get a sense of what map columns look like at the column family level, let's take a look at the social_identities map in alice's user record:

GET users['alice'];

Again, we'll focus solely on the interesting cells in the result:

The structure of the cell names looks identical to the cell names used by set columns. However, unlike set columns, the cells encoding map columns have values in them. In a map, the map keys ...