We need to provide search capability based on a field that is a bitmap combination of 18 possible values. We want to use secondary indexes to improve performance. One possible solution is to create a named column for each value and have a secondary index for each of the 18 columns. Questions we have are:
- Will that result in Cassandra creating 18 new column families, one for each index? - If a given column is not specified in any rows, will Cassandra still create an index column family? - The documentation says that indexes are rebuilt with every Cassandra restart. Why is that needed? What does the rebuild do? Does it read the whole column family into memory at once?