Tombstone vs nodetool and repair

Question

I inserted 10K entries in a table in Cassandra which has the TTL of 1 minute under the single partition.

After the successful insert, I tried to read all the data f

Answer 1

Tombstones are really deleted after period specified by gc_grace_seconds setting of the table (it's 10 days by default). This is done to make sure that any node that was down at time of deletion will pickup these changes after recover. Here are the blog posts that discuss this in great details: from thelastpickle (recommended), 1, 2, and DSE documentation or Cassandra documentation.

You can set the gc_grace_seconds option on the individual table to lower value to remove deleted data faster, but this should be done only for tables with TTLed data. You may also need to tweak tombstone_threshold & tombstone_compaction_interval table options to perform compactions faster. See this document or this document for description of these options.