In this chapter, you're off to a running start with your MyStatus application, having created our first table, inserted data into it, and learned a few ways to retrieve that data. We've developed a model for how Cassandra tables are structured, and taken a deep dive into Cassandra's type system.

We now have experience with the INSERT and SELECT statements, two of the core operations in CQL. You've learned that primary keys, at least the ones we've seen so far, determine the order in which rows are returned, but that ordering is opaque to an application. We can only rely on it being consistent. We've seen some of the limitations of simple tables in Cassandra, and we know that the types of multi-row retrieval we know so far aren't the most efficient.

In Chapter 3, Organizing Related Data, we'll introduce a new way to structure a table that lets us overcome many of the limitations we encountered here.