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)

Using lists for ordered, non-unique values


Let's say that we'd like to allow users to share other user's status updates with their own followers. For each status update, we'll keep track of the shares so that we can display them to the author. Unlike starring a status update, the same user can share the same status update more than once, so we will track shares as discrete events, retaining the order in which they occurred.

A list column fits this task perfectly. Like sets, lists contain collections of values; but unlike sets, values in sets are non-unique and have a stable and defined order.

Defining a list column

First, let's add a new list column to our user_status_updates table:

ALTER TABLE "user_status_updates" 
ADD "shared_by" LIST<text>; 

The syntax for defining a list column is identical to that for defining a set column; we simply swap in LIST for SET.

Writing a list

As with sets, we can directly specify the entire contents of a list, overwriting the current contents:

UPDATE "user_status_updates...