WTF is a SuperColumn? An Intro to the Cassandra Data Model
A bit dated now but I thought some readers might find it useful.
From the posting:
If you’re coming from an RDBMS background (which is almost everyone) you’ll probably trip over some of the naming conventions while learning about Cassandra’s data model. It took me and my team members at Digg a couple days of talking things out before we “got it”. In recent weeks a bikeshed went down in the dev mailing list proposing a completely new naming scheme to alleviate some of the confusion. Throughout this discussion I kept thinking: “maybe if there were some decent examples out there people wouldn’t get so confused by the naming.” So, this is my stab at explaining Cassandra’s data model; It’s intended to help you get your feet wet & doesn’t go into every single detail but, hopefully, it helps clarify a few things.
Seems like I have heard about grouping sets of key/value pairs before but I will have to look for it. 😉
More seriously, the current wave of data sets only aggravates the known semantic impedance problem.
A wave of data sets that promises to only increase.
So semantic impedance is going to increase.
Semantic impedance can be:
- ignored – most current stove-piped information systems
- save-the-world semantic solutions – poor adoption rates
- broken by self-interested mapping that is reusable – the topic maps solution