This has always been my biggest complaint with Cassandra. It performs and works fantastic if you have the right usage patterns, but if you don't fit into that p

This has always been my biggest complaint with Cassandra. It performs and works fantastic if you have the right usage patterns, but if you don't fit into that pattern then you need to mold your usage so that it will fit, or risk the consequences. Using Cassandra effectively is pretty much impossible without knowledge of it's internals and consideration of what effect your usage patterns will have on those internals, which IMO kind of defeats the purpose of a database (keep my data, give it back when I ask).