Peeking Under the Hood - Learning Apache Cassandra - page 270

The structure of a simple primary key
table
To start with, let's have a look at the users table. To do this, we'll start with the LIST
command that prints all the data in a given column family:
LIST users;
This will print out a long list of information, grouped by RowKey . For brevity, the first
couple of RowKey groups appear as follows:
Although we've never seen it structured like this before, the data here should look pretty fa-
miliar. The RowKey headers correspond to the username column in our CQL3 table struc-
ture. Within each RowKey is a collection of tuples, each tuple containing a name, a value,
and a timestamp. We will call these tuple cells, in keeping with the terminology used in the
cassandra-cli interface itself.
Note
You might encounter the word column being used for the name-value-timestamp tuples
we are exploring here. Not only does that terminology invite confusion with the concept of
a column in CQL3, but it's also a singularly misleading way to describe the data structure
in question. We'll stick with "cell", which is both unambiguous and more descriptive.
Please excuse us for referring to collections of cells as column families—there is no better
alternative.