Apache Cassandra is an open source, distributed database management system. Cassandra is designed to handle large amounts of data across many commodity servers. Cassandra uses a query language named CQL.
Cassandra's data model is a partitioned row store; Cassandra combines elements of key-value stores and tabular/columnar databases. Like a relational database, Cassandra stores data in tables, called column families, that have defined columns and associated data types. Each row in a column family is uniquely identified by a key. Each row has multiple columns, each of which has a timestamp, name, and value. Unlike a relational database, each row in a column family does not need to have the same set of columns. At any time, a column may be added to one or more rows. If this explanation is unclear, you might think of column families instead as sets of key-value pairs, in which the values are nested sets of key-value pairs.
The following depicts two rows of a column-family fro