Looking up a specific status update

In our status update application, we'll want to allow direct linking to status updates, in which case we'll need to be able to retrieve a specific status update from the table. So far, we've issued an open-ended SELECT statement to see all the rows we've inserted in user_status_updates, but we haven't seen how to return one particular row.

Since the user_status_updates table has a compound primary key, we need new CQL syntax to allow us to specify values for multiple columns in order to form a unique identifier. CQL provides the AND construct for this purpose:

SELECT * FROM "user_status_updates" 
WHERE "username" = 'alice' 
AND "id" = 76e7a4d0-e796-11e3-90ce-5f98e903bf02;

By specifying both the username and the id, we identify exactly one row:

We now have all the tools we need to interact with the user_status_updates table in the same way as we interact with the users table; let's move on to explore some of the things that make a compound primary key table different.