title: How to define dynamic column families in cassandra
body: <p><a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8762377/how-to-define-dynamic-columns-in-a-column-family-in-cassandra">Here</a> it is said, that no special effort is need to get a dynamic column family. But I always get an exception, when I try to set a value for an undefined column.</p>
  
  <p>I created a column family like this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>CREATE TABLE places (
     latitude double,
     longitude double,
     name text,
     tags text,
     PRIMARY KEY (latitude, longitude, name)
  )
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>BTW: I had to define the tags column. Can somebody explain me why? Maybe because all other columns are part of the Index?</p>
  
  <p>Now when inserting data like this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>INSERT INTO places ("latitude","longitude","name","tags") VALUES (49.797888,9.934771,'Test','foo,bar')
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>it works just fine! But when I try:</p>
  
  <pre><code>INSERT INTO places ("latitude","longitude","name","tags","website") VALUES (49.797888,9.934771,'Test','foo,bar','test.de')
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I get following error:</p>
  
  <pre><code>Bad Request: Unknown identifier website
  text could not be lexed at line 1, char 21
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Which changes are needed so I can dynamically add columns?</p>
  
  <p>I am using Cassandra 1.1.9 with CQL3 with the cqlsh directly on a server.</p>