Hi, We're maintaining a bunch of application specific counters that are incremented on a per event basis just after the event has been inserted.
Given the fact that they can get of sync, we were wondering if there are any best practices or just plain real world experience for handling the consistency of these counters? The application could tolerate an inconsistency for a while, so I'm not sure that the cost of any full-on ACID semantics (should they actually be possible in Cassandra) would be justified. So the first inclination was to issue the increment after the insert and hope for the best. Then at some later point, we would run a reconciliation on the underlying data in the column family and compare this with the counter values. Obviously you can only do this once a counter column has gone cold - i.e. it wouldn't make sense to reconcile something that could still get incremented. Does it make sense to put the insert and increment in a CQL batch? Does anybody have any high level advice for this design deliberation? Cheers, Ben
