Given that Cassandra needs to maintain tombstones to handle distributed deletes, does the existence of deleted columns slow down slices?
To be more concrete, suppose I used a row as a queue. I keep adding columns to the end of the sort order of a column family, and I keep deleting columns from the start of the sort order. After some time, the row would have a large number of deleted columns followed by a number of undeleted columns in the column family. Does slicing for the first N columns from the row now require scanning over all the initial deleted columns (meaning reads would get more expensive as time goes on), or are the deleted columns stored separately to enable Cassandra to skip over deleted columns when processing reads? Edmond
