Learning Apache Cassandra - Second Edition

Cassandra's partitioning strategy - partition key tokens

As application developers working with Cassandra, we never need to go through the earlier calculus: when we write or read data, we can perform the query on any node in the cluster and Cassandra will figure out where the data resides. The federation process is entirely transparent to the application.

As it turns out, Cassandra uses a strategy analogous to the naïve primary key modulus approach described earlier. Recall from Chapter 2, The First Table, that Cassandra has a TOKEN function that generates an integer value for any partition key; when we retrieve results over multiple partition keys, the rows are ordered by this token.