Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you use a local index when your data is distributed across numerous nodes? Maybe I'm missing something fundamental, so I'd definitely like to understand.
It's hidden from me behind client library API(astyanax in my case), I shouldn't know anything about index locality. I just send request(give me records for this index value), and get response and don't care if it's local index or distributed index. Astyanax takes care about everything, it queries all nodes.
Just refreshing my memory here, but this blog post [1] is what kept me away from secondary indexes and explains why I need something more from Cassandra. Especially the section on "The Good: Secondary Indexes", I actually have some data that is stored by timestamp, that was, as I recall, the biggest turn-off on them.
Has the state of affairs advanced since a year ago? Would love to hear it has!
[1] http://brianoneill.blogspot.com/2012/03/cassandra-indexing-g...