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If i have a Primary key statement like Primary Key((year),moviename) for a table. will i be able to insert 2014, Interstellar in a row and 2017, Interstellar in another row. Same movie name on different years
Should the clustering key/keys defines uniqueness or we can rely on year which is a partition key in addition to the clustering column to define uniqueness
In Cassandra, a primary key uniquely identifies a row in a table whereas a partition key uniquely identifies a partition and its location the ring (which node stores it).
If you're interested, I go into this into a bit more detail in question #6171.
To answer your question, year is not a good choice for a partition key because you potentially end up with hundreds or even thousands of rows of movies in each partition. As an example, the-numbers.com lists 1,525 movies in 2014 and 3,611 movies in 2017 [1].
The movie title is also not a good choice because it is not universally unique. A quick internet search returns these movies with the same title but were released in different years [2]:
If your goal is uniqueness, then I suggest you model your table as follows:
CREATE TABLE movies (
movie_title text,
year int,
...
PRIMARY KEY ((movie_title, year))
)
In this case, the partition key is (movie_title, year).
In this model, the combination of movie title and year make partitions unique. For example, Bad Boys:1983 and Bad Boys:1995 are universally unique. Similarly, The Avengers:1998 and The Avengers:2012 are 2 distinct partitions in the table. Cheers!
[1] https://www.the-numbers.com/movies/#tab=year
[2] https://www.ifc.com/2015/07/movies-that-share-the-same-name-and-not-much-else
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