Cassandra ttl on a row

Question

I know that there are TTLs on columns in Cassandra. But is it also possible to set a TTL on a row? Setting a TTL on each column doesn\'t solve my problem as can be seen in t

Answer 1

There is no way of setting a TTL on a row in Cassandra currently. TTLs are designed for deleting individual columns when their lifetime is known when they are written.

You could achieve what you want by delaying your process - instead of wanting to insert a TTL of 1 week, run it a week later and delete the row. Row deletes have the following semantics: any column inserted just before will get deleted but columns inserted just after won't be.

If columns that are inserted in the future still need to be deleted you could insert a row delete with a timestamp in the future to ensure this but be very careful: if you later wanted to insert into that row you couldn't, columns would just disappear when written to that row (until the tombstone is garbage collected).