Learning Apache Cassandra - Second Edition

Discretely writable collections

While it's useful for records to be internally structured into discrete fields, a given property of a record isn't always a single value such as a string or an integer. One simple way to handle fields that contain collections of values is to serialize them using a format such as JSON and then save the serialized collection into a text field. However, in order to update collections stored in this way, the serialized data must be read from the database, decoded, modified, and then written back to the database in its entirety. If two clients try to perform this kind of modification to the same record concurrently, one of the updates will be overwritten by the other. For this reason, many databases offer built-in ...