The ability to effectively utilize a database's potential is more of an art than science. It is important to know the capabilities and things that have already been achieved by other people. But at the same time, you need to stay creative to mix and match the patterns to meet the requirements and goals within the limits of available resources. This chapter is probably the most important chapter from the perspective of an application developer. Starting from storage components of Cassandra to some of the common patterns to solve the common use cases, this chapter builds a solid footing for you to code your application confidently.
Cassandra's code base is developing at a rapid pace. With this fast-paced development, new features are getting added quickly at the same time and lesser-known patterns and bad design decisions are getting deprecated. CQL 3 is a good example of this.
CQL3 prevents use of antipatterns to some extent. It also gives a much friendlier SQL-like interface than Thrift...