What's the difference between creating a table and creating a columnfamily in Cassandra?

Question

I need details from both performance and query aspects, I learnt from some site that only a key can be given when using a columnfamily, if so what would you suggest for

Answer 1

To answer the original question you posed: a column family and a table are the same thing.

• The name "column family" was used in the older Thrift API.
• The name "table" is used in the newer CQL API.

More info on the APIs can be found here: http://wiki.apache.org/cassandra/API

If you need to use "group by,order by,count,sum,ifnull,concat ,joins and some times nested querys" as you state then you probably don't want to use Cassandra, since it doesn't support most of those.

CQL supports COUNT, but only up to 10000. It supports ORDER BY, but only on clustering keys. The other things you mention are not supported at all.