Adding NoSQL Persistence to Storm - Real-time Analytics with Storm and Cassandra - page 118

Types of column families

There are two types of column families:

• Static column family : As the name suggests, this has a static set of columns and is
a very close surrogate of all well-known RDBMS tables, barring a few differences
that are a result of its NoSQL heritage. Here is an example of a static column fam-
ily:

Rowkey Columns

Raman Name E-mail Cell no. Age

Raman Subramanian [e-mail] 9999999999 20

Edison Name E-mail Cell no. Age

Edison Weasley [e-mail] 88888888888 30

Amey Name E-mail Cell no. Age

Amey Marriot [e-mail] 7777777777 40

Sriman Name E-mail

Sriman Mishra [e-mail]

• Dynamic column family : This one gets the true essence of being unstructured and
schema-less. Here, we don't use predefined columns associated with the column
family, but the same can be dynamically generated and supplied by the client ap-
plication at the time of inserting data into the column family. During the creation
or definition of a dynamic column family, we get to define the information about
the column names and values by defining the comparators and validators. Here is
an example of a dynamic column family:

Rowkey Columns

Name E-mail Cell no. Age

Raman