I can't figure out if in the implementation of Apache Cassandra the notion of partition and family column is the same!? It seems that Cassandra is no longer of column family databases but more likely a tabular partitioned database. Can some please explain. I'm following this paper work
No.
A columnfamily, now called Table (since CQL took over thrift), is a table which is going to be saved on all nodes in your Cassandra cluster.
How the data of a table is broken down on nodes is the work of the partitioner, so the partitioning mechanism has nothing to do with the concept of a table since from the outside you are not supposed to know whether your data is saved on node 1 or node 2 or node 3...
Finally, the partitioner is defined for a cluster as a whole. This, in part, defines things such as whether your rows will be sorted (which is not a good idea because then the number of rows saved on a given node will not be well balanced.)
For additional information, you may want to search for the word "partition" on this page: