We just set up a demo cluster with Cassandra 0.8.1 with 12 nodes and loaded 1.5 TB of data into it. However, the actual space on disk being used by data files in Cassandra is 3 TB. We're using a standard column family with a million rows (key=string) and 35,040 columns per key. The column name is a long and the column value is a double.
I was just hoping to understand more about why the data overhead is so large. We're not using expiring columns. Even considering indexing and bloom filters, it shouldn't have bloated up the data size to 2x the original amount. Or should it have? How can we better anticipate the actual data usage on disk in the future? - Sameer
