Learning Apache Cassandra - Second Edition

Exploring cells

Looking at the name attribute, we see things like email, encrypted_password, version, and location. Clearly, the name attribute of the cells corresponds to the names of columns in our CQL schema-although the relationship is more complex than it might appear, as we'll explore in the next section.

The value field in the cells is a bit of a mystery; given that the name contains column names, we might expect that the value would contain column values. However, what we see in cassandra-cli are just some inscrutable hexadecimal blobs.

As it turns out, under the hood Cassandra represents all data as hexadecimal byte arrays; the type system is part of CQL's abstraction layer. The cassandra-cli utility does give us a way to retrieve ...