secondary indexes in Cassandra under RandomPartitioner

I am researc开发者_开发知识库hing the possibility of using secondary index feature in Cassandra using Aquiles. I know for the primary index (key), a I must be using OrderPreservingPartitioner in order to query. At first, I thought that with secondary indexes, there is no such limitation, but I noticed that start key is part of GetIndexedSlicesCommand. Does that imply that under RandomPartitioner, this command is unusable?

You don't need OrderPreservingPartitioner to query by row key, it's only needed if you want to get a meaningful range of rows by their key, like 'all rows with a key between 5 and 9'. (Note that can and should almost always use RandomPartitioner instead.)

The start key for get_indexed_slices behaves the same way that it does for get_range_slices. That is, it's not very meaningful for examining a range of rows between two keys when using RandomPartitioner, but it is useful for paging through a lot of rows. There's even a FAQ entry on the topic. Basically, if you're going to get a ton of results from a call to get_indexed_slices, you don't want to fetch them all at once, you want to get a chunk (of 10, 100, or 1000, depending on size) at a time, and then set the start_key to the last key you saw in the previous chunk to get the next chunk.