Now that we've established the relatively familiar-looking column family structure of users—a table with a simple primary key—let's move on to a table with a compound primary key. To start, let's take a look at home_status_updates, a fairly straightforward table. Recall that this table has a partition key timeline_username; a clustering column status_update_id; and two data columns, body and status_update_username column.

We'll use the LIST command to take a look at the contents of the column family and, beforehand, we'll use the ASSUME command to set the value output format to utf8. This has a similar effect as the AS modifier we used earlier, but it applies to all cells in a column family, rather than only cells with a specific name:

ASSUME home_status_updates VALIDATOR AS utf8;
LIST home_status_updates;

The output of the LIST command takes the same general shape as that for the users column family, but the way...