Cassandra column family displays differently through CLI and DataStax

Question

I'm trying to understand why I'm seeing different data in two ways to display Cassandra (1.2.x) column family columns.

In the first, I use cassandra-cli to list the rows in a column family.

[cassandra-cli]> list Users columns 1;
Using default limit of 100
-------------------
RowKey: [rowkey1]
=> (name=[name1], value=[value1], timestamp=[timestamp1])

The data between [] is a placeholder for the value. In reality, they are displayed as the hex representation of a byte[]. The above seems to indicate there is one row with a single column (which has a name, a value, and a timestamp).

I'm doing what I think is equivalent with the DataStax v1 API

var cluster = Cluster.Builder ()
    .AddContactPoint ("127.0.0.1")
    .Build ();

var metadata = cluster.Metadata;
var keyspace = "keyspaceName";
var tableMetadatas = metadata.GetTables(keyspace);

foreach (var tableMetadata in tableMetadatas) {
    var session = cluster.Connect(keyspace);    

    var rowSet = session.Execute("SELECT * FROM \""+ tableMetadata + "\" ", ConsistencyLevel.One);
    CqlColumn[] columns = rowSet.Columns;
                
    foreach(var column in columns) {
        Console.WriteLine("Column name: " + column.Name + ", type: " + column.Type + ", keyspace: " + column.Keyspace);
    }

    foreach (var row in rowSet.GetRows()) {
        for (int i = 0; i < row.Length; i++) {
            String value = Encoding.UTF8.GetString(row.GetValue<byte[]>(i));
                        Console.WriteLine(value);
        }
    }
}

This displays

Column name: key, type: System.Byte[], keyspace: keyspaceName
Column name: column1, type: System.Byte[], keyspace: keyspaceName
Column name: value, type: System.Byte[], keyspace: keyspaceName
[The string value of rowkey1]
[The string value of name1]
[The string value of value1]

This seems to indicate there are 3 columns: one with name key, where the value is the rowkey; one with name column1, where the value is the value of name1; and one with name value, where the value is the value of value1.

How should I be interpreting these discrepancies?

Answer 1

When using cassandra-cli you are seeing a "Thrift-perspective" of your storage, while using the DataStax driver and cqlsh will give you the "CQL-perspective".

There was a series of posts describing how these 2 are related. I've linked to these in my answer to the Different between Thrift and CQL3 columns question on SO.