When working with a new or unfamiliar technology, we might find ourselves struggling to apply it to the problem at hand. This is why it is a common practice in software engineering to seek out established design patterns. Such patterns provide guide rails to keep us headed in the right direction, and therefore avoid the traps that await those who try to figure it out on their own.

Design patterns are established through the (often painful) experience of early technology adopters who have blazed the trails and provided us with nicely groomed paths. However, with any given technology, we find some commonly used trails lead to dangers in the woods. In software design, we call these antipatterns.

In the previous chapter, we focused on how to model your data correctly to take advantage of Cassandra's natural sorting and distribution properties. This chapter, by contrast, will take the opposite approach. We will expose many of the well-worn but dangerous paths so that you...