Cassandra didn't actually get rid of the schemaless structure, and you can still use it. All the introduction of CQL did was make some assumptions on the storag

Cassandra didn't actually get rid of the schemaless structure, and you can still use it. All the introduction of CQL did was make some assumptions on the storage format, based on common use cases, and essentially hid the underlying format for you. If you read up on CQL3, you will see the schema-less trait is still there, and just as performant, but only slightly confusing if you come from the SQL world. In a way, CQL3 is a "hack" to make a schema-less database look like it enforces a schema. The Primary Key became the Row Key, the secondary key became the cell name, and the value became all the other fields. The column names are still dynamic, and the schema doesn't really exist on disc except in metadata.