I'm attempting to come up with a technique for limiting the number of columns a single key (or super column - doesn't matter too much for the context of this conversation) may contain at any one time. My actual use-case is a little too meaty to try to describe so an alternate use-case of this mechanism could be:
*Construct a twitter-esque feed which maintains a list N tweets. Tweets (in this system - and in reality I suppose) occur at such a rate that you want to limit a given users "feed" to N items. You do not have the ability to store an infinite number of tweets due to the physical constraints of your hardware.* The "*my first idea*" answer is when a tweet is inserted into the the feed of a given person, that you then do a count and delete of any outstanding tweets. In reality you could first count, then (if count >= N) do a batch mutate for the insertion of the new entry and the removal of the old. My issue with this approach is that after a certain point every new entry into the system will incur the removal of an old entry. The count, once a feed has reached N will always be >= N on any subsequent queries. Depending on how you index the tweets you may need to actually do a read instead of count to get the row identifiers. My second approach was to utilize a "slot" system where you have a record stored somewhere that indicates the next slot for insertion. This can be thought of as a fixed length array where you store the next insertion point in some other column family. When a new tweet occurs you retrieve the current "slot" meta-data, insert into that index, then update the meta-data for the next insertion. My concerns with this relate around synchronization and losing entries due to concurrent operations. I'd rather not have to something like ZooKeeper to synchronize in the application cluster. I have some other ideas but I'm mostly just spit-balling at this point. So I thought I'd reach out the collective intelligence of the group to see if anyone has implemented something similar. Thanks in advance.
