Columnar database fundamentals

One of the most important aspects of getting started with NoSQL data stores is getting to understand the fundamentals of columnar databases; or rather, let's use the actual term—column families.

This is a concept that has a variety of implementations in different NoSQL databases, for instance:

• Cassandra: This is a key-value-pair-based NoSQL DB

• Mongo DB: This is a document-based NoSQL DB

• Neo4J: This is a graph DB

They differ from conventional RDBMS systems that are row-oriented in terms of the following:

• Performance

• Storage extendibility

• Fault tolerance

• Low or no licensing cost

But having iterated all the differences and benefits of NoSQL DBs, you must clearly understand that the shift to NoSQL is a shift of the entire paradigm of data storage, availability, and access—they are not a replacement for RDBMS.

In the RDBMS world, we are all used to creating tables, but here in Cassandra, we create column families where we define the metadata of the columns, but the columns...