I believe that is precisely what Riak does in the "Riak now does this" link provided, and that's effectively what is going on under the hood with Cassandra. This means more overhead per column and the loss of the ability to just encode the data fields in an application native serialization structure.
In effect, you throw out a lot of the less talked about advantages of NoSQL and end up with something more like traditional SQL databases (not necessarily a bad thing, just different).
In effect, you throw out a lot of the less talked about advantages of NoSQL and end up with something more like traditional SQL databases (not necessarily a bad thing, just different).