title: Are there any major disadvantages to having multiple clustering columns in cassandra?
body: <p>I'm designing a cassandra table where I need to be able able to retrieve rows by their geohash.  I have something that works, but I'd like to avoid range queries more so than I'm currently able to.</p>
  
  <p>The current table schema is this, with geo_key containing the first five characters of the geohash string.  I query using the geo_key, then range filter on the full geohash, allowing me to prefix search based on a 5 or greater length geohash:  </p>
  
  <pre><code>CREATE TABLE georecords (geo_key text,geohash text, data text) PRIMARY KEY (geo_key, geohash))
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>My idea is that I could instead store the characters of the geohash as seperate columns, allowing me to specify as many caracters as I wanted, to do a prefix match on the geohash.  My concern is what impact using multiple clustering columns might have:</p>
  
  <pre><code>CREATE TABLE georecords (g1 text,g2 text,g3 text,g4 text,g5 text,g6 text,g7 text,g8 text,geohash text, data text) PRIMARY KEY (g1,g2,g3,g4,g5,g6,g7,g8,geohash,pid))
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>(I'm not really concerned about the cardinality of the partition key - g1 would have minimum 30 values, and I have other workarounds for it as well)</p>
  
  <p>Other that cardinality of the partition key, and extra storage requirements, what should I be aware of if I used the many cluster column approach?</p>