On Thu, Aug 16, 2012 at 9:08 PM, Terry Cumaranatunge <cumar...@gmail.com>wrote: > > We have a Cassandra 1.0 cluster that we run with RF=3 and perform > operations using a consistency level of quorum. We use batch_mutate for all > inserts and updates for atomicity across column families with the same row > key, but use the thrift interface remove API call in C++ to delete a row so > that we can delete an entire row without having to specify individual > column names. If you use the remove function to delete an entire row, is > that an atomic operation? In other words, can it delete a partial number of > columns in the row and leave other columns around? >
It all depends on the timestamp for the column. A row level delete will place a row tombstone at the timestamp given, causing all columns with an earlier timestamp to be deleted. If a column has a later timestamp then the row tombstone, then it wont be deleted. More info here: http://wiki.apache.org/cassandra/DistributedDeletes -- Derek Williams
