In this chapter, we confronted and explored the major issues that stem from Cassandra's masterless, distributed, and replicated architecture. Interacting with Cassandra often feels indistinguishable from working with a single-node data store, but when working with any distributed database, we need to think about the trade-off between consistency and availability. In some situations, we might be willing to read slightly out-of-date data for the sake of performance and failure tolerance; in others, we will tolerate a higher probability of a request failing in order to ensure that the data we're reading is fully up-to-date.
You learned that the partition key for a row determines not only its physical location in storage but also which ...
