Undo like pointers, tombstones
Cassandra uses a log-structured storage engine. Because of this, deletes do not remove the rows and columns immediately and in-place. Instead, Cassandra writes a special marker, called a tombstone, indicating that a row, column, or range of columns was deleted. These tombstones are kept for at least the period of time defined by the gc_grace_seconds per-table setting. Only then a tombstone can be permanently discarded by compaction.
This scheme allows for very fast deletes (and writes in general), but it’s not free: aside from the obvious RAM/disk overhead of tombstones, you might have to pay a certain price when reading data back if you haven’t modelled your data well.
gc_grace_seconds - Kind of undo retention
tombstone_warn_threshold
(Default: 1000) The maximum number of tombstones a query can scan before warning.
tombstone_failure_threshold
(Default: 100000) The maximum number of tombstones a query can scan before aborting.
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