Learning Apache Cassandra - Second Edition

List columns in column families

The last collection type we'll explore at the column family level is lists. Lists are the most complex collection types in a couple of ways. As you learned in Chapter 8, Collections, Tuples, and User-defined Types, lists have more available mutation operations than maps or sets. It also turns out that lists have the most complex underlying representation.

Let's take a look at the shared_by list in the user_status_updates table. Before we dive into the underlying structure, let's quickly open a cqlsh console and add a new value to the shared_by list of alice. When we last left this list, it only had a single username in it, which isn't really useful for the purposes of our exploration:

UPDATE "user_status_updates" ...