Database Reference
In-Depth Information
A complete mapping
With this insight, we can now generate a complete mapping between the components of a
column family and the CQL-level table structure components they represent:
Column Family Com-
ponent
CQL3 Table Component
RowKey
Partition Key
Cell name
The values of clustering column(s), if any, followed by the name of the data column
The value in the row/column identified by the partition key, clustering column(s), and the
column name
Cell value
To reinforce this idea, let's apply our visualization from the previous section to the more
complex structure of
home_status_updates
:
The main insight here is that every value in every row in
alice
's partition is stored in a
one-dimensional data structure in the column family. At the column family level, nothing
in the storage structure distinguishes the values in
carol
's status update row from the val-
ues in
dave
's status update row. The cells containing those values simply have different
prefixes in their cell names; only at the CQL level are these represented as distinct rows.
