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 familiar. The RowKey headers correspond to the username column in our CQL3 table structure. 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.

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...