I'm exploring data layouts and it seems like the common practice is to store an index in one CF (e.g. userid for row key and thingid for column name) and then to fetch all the things by their thingids separately... so get index, and then get each key in the index.
If a thing changes relatively infrequently but gets read often, seems like it would be more performant (especially with writes being very fast) to just stuff whole objects into indexes rather than simply ids. A "whole object" could be a JSON object or a serialized class or who knows what. Are there drawbacks to that approach, other than space? Thanks, Jeremey.