Introduction
Cassandra is a partitioned row store, where rows are organized into tables with a required primary key.
The first component of a table's primary key is the partition key; within a partition, rows are clustered by the remaining columns of the PK. Other columns may be indexed independent of the PK.
This allows pervasive denormalization to "pre-build" resultsets at update time, rather than doing expensive joins across the cluster.
Patrick McFadin's data modeling series:
- The Data Model is Dead; Long live the Data Model: Video, Slides
- Become a Super Modeler: Video, Slides
- The World's Next Top Data Model: Video, Slides
- Apache Cassandra 2.0: Data Model on Fire: Video, Slides
- Real Data Models of Silicon Valley: Video, Slides
- The most important thing to know in Cassandra data modeling: The primary key. (Blog post)