Learning Apache Cassandra - Second Edition

Extracting timestamps

As we previously mentioned, Cassandra has special capabilities for the timeuuid type, which includes extracting the timestamp that's encoded in these UUIDs. We can see this in action using the DATEOF function:

SELECT "username", "id", "body", DATEOF("id") FROM "user_status_updates";

The DATEOF function instructs Cassandra to return a result column containing the timestamp at which the given column's UUID value was created. We now have access to information encoded in the id column that was previously obscure:

If you're following along with your CQL shell, you'll notice that the dates do not tell you when the rows were ...