I am just getting start on Cassandra and I was trying to create tables with different partition and clustering keys to see how they can be queried differently.
I created a table with primary key of the form - (a),b,c where a is the partition key and b,c are clustering key.
When querying I noticed that the following query:
select * from tablename where b=val;
results in:
Cannot execute this query as it might involve data filtering and thus may have unpredictable performance. If you want to execute this query despite the performance unpredictability, use ALLOW FILTERING
And using "ALLOW FILTERING" gets me what I want (even though I've heard its bad for performance).
But when I run the following query:
select * from tablename where c=val;
It says:
PRIMARY KEY column "c" cannot be restricted (preceding column "b" is either not restricted or by a non-EQ relation)
And there is no "ALLOW FILTERING" option at all.
MY QUESTION IS - Why are all clustering keys not treated the same? column b which is adjacent to the partition key 'a' is given an option of 'allow filtering' which allows querying on it while querying on column 'c' does not seem possible at all (given the way this table is laid out).
ALLOW FILTERING gets cassandra to scan through all SSTables and get the data out of it when the partition key is missing, then why cant we do the same column c?
