Hello Kevin, In 2.0.X an SSTable is automatically dropped if it contains only tombstones: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-5228. However this will most likely happen if you use LCS. STCS will create sstables of larger size that will probably have mixed expired and unexpired data. This could be solved by the single-sstable tombstone compaction that unfortunately is not working well ( https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-6563).
I don't know of a way to manually drop specific sstables safely, you could try implementing a script that compares sstables timestamps to check if an sstable is safely droppable as done in CASSANDRA-5228. There are proposals to create a compaction strategy optimized for log only data that only deletes old sstables but it's not ready yet AFAIK. Cheers, Paulo On Mon, May 12, 2014 at 8:53 PM, Kevin Burton <bur...@spinn3r.com> wrote: > We have a log only data structure… everything is appended and nothing is > ever updated. > > We should be totally fine with having lots of SSTables sitting on disk > because even if we did a major compaction the data would still look the > same. > > By 'lots' I mean maybe 1000 max. Maybe 1GB each. > > However, I would like a way to delete older data. > > One way to solve this could be to just drop an entire SSTable if all the > records inside have tombstones. > > Is this possible, to just drop a specific SSTable? > > -- > > Founder/CEO Spinn3r.com > Location: *San Francisco, CA* > Skype: *burtonator* > blog: http://burtonator.wordpress.com > … or check out my Google+ > profile<https://plus.google.com/102718274791889610666/posts> > <http://spinn3r.com> > War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. Corporations are > people. > > -- *Paulo Motta* Chaordic | *Platform* *www.chaordic.com.br <http://www.chaordic.com.br/>* +55 48 3232.3200
