Learning Apache Cassandra - Second Edition

Physical data model

Finally, you might want to make further optimizations to the table design to speed up the queries. These optimizations could include the following:

• Splitting partitions in a table to keep their size manageable
• Merging partitions to speed up queries
• Adding columns for efficient querying

Querying non-primary key columns is either not supported or very expensive. In certain situations, it might be useful to create secondary indexes or materialized views to facilitate efficient querying on non-primary key columns. Some scenarios also require us to use distributed counters or lightweight transactions. We will take a look at all of the aforementioned features in the following chapters.