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...
