Cassandra 0.7 Can Pack 2 Billion Columns Into a Row

Posted by timothy on Sunday January 16, 2011 @12:58PM from the but-only-if-they're-really-thin dept.

angry tapir writes "The cadre of volunteer developers behind the Cassandra distributed database have released the latest version of their open source software, able to hold up to 2 billion columns per row. The newly installed Large Row Support feature of Cassandra version 0.7 allows the database to hold up to 2 billion columns per row. Previous versions had no set upper limit, though the maximum amount of material that could be held in a single row was approximately 2GB. This upper limit has been eliminated."

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Re:Typical applications? by gratuitous_arp · 2011-01-16 13:20 · Score: 5, Interesting

Apparently the extra columns can be used to the effect of doing "more" than store data. A link in the article explains how lots of extra columns can be useful for querying data (Casandra doesn't use SQL). http://maxgrinev.com/2010/07/12/do-you-really-need-sql-to-do-it-all-in-cassandra/
So the primary reason for this doesn't seem to be that one's run-of-the-mill database needs more columns.