Book Image

Learning Apache Cassandra - Second Edition

Book Image

Learning Apache Cassandra - Second Edition

Overview of this book

Cassandra is a distributed database that stands out thanks to its robust feature set and intuitive interface, while providing high availability and scalability of a distributed data store. This book will introduce you to the rich feature set offered by Cassandra, and empower you to create and manage a highly scalable, performant and fault-tolerant database layer. The book starts by explaining the new features implemented in Cassandra 3.x and get you set up with Cassandra. Then you’ll walk through data modeling in Cassandra and the rich feature set available to design a flexible schema. Next you’ll learn to create tables with composite partition keys, collections and user-defined types and get to know different methods to avoid denormalization of data. You will then proceed to create user-defined functions and aggregates in Cassandra. Then, you will set up a multi node cluster and see how the dynamics of Cassandra change with it. Finally, you will implement some application-level optimizations using a Java client. By the end of this book, you'll be fully equipped to build powerful, scalable Cassandra database layers for your applications.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)

Unfollowing users


It's conceivable that bob may end up posting too many funny cat pictures for alice's taste, in which case, she may decide to unfollow him. For alice to do that, we'll need to remove the rows representing the follow relationship from both the inbound and outbound follow tables:

DELETE FROM "user_outbound_follows" 
WHERE "follower_username" = 'alice' 
  AND "followed_username" = 'bob'; 

DELETE FROM "user_inbound_follows" 
WHERE "followed_username" = 'bob' 
  AND "follower_username" = 'alice';

This is our first encounter with CQL's DELETE statement, although it should look quite familiar to anyone who's worked with SQL. To delete a row, we specify the full primary key of the row, that is, both the partition key(s) and the clustering column(s). The WHERE...AND syntax is the same as that used in SELECT queries, introduced in Chapter 3, Organizing Related Data.

To check the effects of the deletion, we can query again for the list of users alice follows:

  SELECT "followed_username...