Standard column family

In analogy with relational databases, a standard column family is as a "table", each key–value pair being a "row".

As an example, a relational table could consist of the columns UID, first name, surname, birthdate, gender, etc.

In a distributed data store, the same table would be implemented by creating columns families for "UID, first name, surname", "birthdate, gender", etc.

In a distributed data store, it suffices to access only the second standard column family, as the rest of information is irrelevant.

In JSON-like notation, a column family definition would look as follows:[6] where "Cassandra", "TerryCho", "Cath" correspond to row keys; and "emailAddress", "age", "gender", "address" correspond to the column names.