Working with status updates

Now that we've got our status updates table ready, let's create our first status update:

INSERT INTO "user_status_updates" 
("username", "id", "body") 
VALUES ( 
  'alice', 
  76e7a4d0-e796-11e3-90ce-5f98e903bf02, 
  'Learning Cassandra!' 
);

This will look pretty familiar; we specify the table we want to insert data into, the list of columns we're going to provide data for, and the values for these columns in the given order.

Let's give bob a status update too by inserting the following row in the user_status_updates table:

INSERT INTO "user_status_updates" 
("username", "id", "body") 
VALUES ( 
  'bob', 
  97719c50-e797-11e3-90ce-5f98e903bf02, 
  'Eating a tasty sandwich.' 
);

Now we have two rows, each identified by the combination of the username and id columns. Let's take a look at the contents of our table using the following SELECT statement:

SELECT * FROM "user_status_updates";

We'll be able to see the two rows that we inserted, as follows:

Note that, as we saw in the users table, the rows are not returned in lexical order of username; indeed, they're in the same order as the user records themselves are. Recall from the Paginating through results section of Chapter 2, The First Table, that the username column is ordered by an internally generated token, which is deterministic but meaningless from the application's perspective.