Reddit also just uses it as a dumb K/V store and don't take advantage of the column-store model. In theory, all of the comments for a story could be stored as c

Reddit also just uses it as a dumb K/V store and don't take advantage of the column-store model. In theory, all of the comments for a story could be stored as columns in a column family. While this would reduce the write throughput to something like ~1000/second -- for a single story -- because partition granularity is at the row level, within a row, all the columns in a CF are stored sequentially on disk, and it also means only a single node would need to be interrogated to get the data, rather than having to broadcast a massive multi-get across the entire cluster. EDIT: the column keys are also returned in sorted order, so this could be used to pre-sort the comment list by it's optimal access pattern.