Inserts, updates, and upserts

So far, we've used the INSERT statements to add new rows to our tables and the UPDATE statements to update information in existing rows. As it turns out, both the INSERT and UPDATE statements can modify existing rows and can create new rows. We took a brief look at how INSERT statements can modify existing data as well in Chapter 2, The First Table. We will expand a bit more on this functionality of Cassandra in this section. At their core, we can most accurately think of the INSERT and UPDATE statements as providing different syntax for the same underlying operation, an upsert.

This is quite astonishing for those of us who are used to SQL, in which the INSERT and UPDATE statements are entirely distinct. While there are some situations in which the upsert behavior is quite handy, it can also be a stumbling block, especially for developers who are new to Cassandra. Fortunately, Cassandra offers us ways to ensure that our write operations behave the way we intend...