Cassandra's built-in secondary indexes are more of a hash-style index, as opposed to a B-tree. As such, at least one equality comparison is required to perform lookups efficiently (any additional column predicates result in late-filtering of the equality matches). Try the following wiki page for a decent starting point for questions about Cassandra's secondary indexes: http://wiki.apache.org/cassandra/SecondaryIndexes from : http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11939093/cql-and-range-on-secondary-indexed-columns