Retrieving all the rows

Perhaps we'd like to expand our administrative interface to show a list of all the users who've signed up for MyStatus. To do this, we'll want to simply ask Cassandra for all the user records:

    SELECT * FROM "users";

Since we omitted the WHERE portion of the query, Cassandra will simply return all rows in the users table:

If you've been following along with the examples, you'll see that the latest query returns both rows that we've inserted into the database. However, had we inserted over 10,000 rows, we'd notice that only 10,000 rows would be returned. This is a limit built into cqlsh; using a language driver, you can retrieve result sets of arbitrary size.

You'll also notice that bob is returned before alice. Clearly, rows are not returned in lexical order of their primary key. As it happens, in a table with a single primary key column, row ordering is deterministic but not defined from a client standpoint. Deterministic ordering is enough, however, to allow us to  page through very large result sets.

You'll find a full reference for the SELECT statement in the DataStax CQL documentation at http://www.datastax.com/documentation/cql/3.1/cql/cql_reference/select_r.html.