The difference is that all the cells with the same `id` would belong to the same partition and stored together, so you'd be able to write them atomically and read them together cheaply in a single operation.

What marshray suggested would look like this:

create table bucket.users (name text, field text, value text, primary key ((name, field))); - with a composite partition key. Then you'd have two separate single-cell partitions "jbellis:email" : "jbellis@example.com" and "jbellis:phone" : "555-5555". You don't want to do that in either Riak or Cassandra.