Please read about Sorted wide rows and Clustering ORDER KEY. Some excerpts from CQL specification page "Partition key and clustering columns
In CQL, the order in which columns are defined for the PRIMARY KEY matters. The first column of the key is called the partition key. It has the property that all the rows sharing the same partition key (even across table in fact) are stored on the same physical node. Also, insertion/update/deletion on rows sharing the same partition key for a given table are performed atomically and in isolation. Note that it is possible to have a composite partition key, i.e. a partition key formed of multiple columns, using an extra set of parentheses to define which columns forms the partition key.
The remaining columns of the PRIMARY KEY definition, if any, are called __clustering columns. On a given physical node, rows for a given partition key are stored in the order induced by the clustering columns, making the retrieval of rows in that clustering order particularly efficient (see SELECT).
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