[CASSANDRA-6756] Provide option to avoid loading orphan SSTables on startup

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Resolved
• Priority: Normal
• Resolution: Won't Fix
• Fix Version/s: 1.2.17
• Assignee: Unassigned
• Reporter: Vincent Mallet
• Created: 23/Feb/14 18:57
• Updated: 16/Apr/19 09:31
• Resolved: 18/Jun/14 19:28

Description

When Cassandra starts up, it enumerates all SSTables on disk for a known column family and proceeds to loading all of them, even those that were left behind before the restart because of a problem of some sort. This can lead to "data gain" (resurrected data) which is just as bad as data loss.

The ask is to provide a yaml config option which would allow one to turn that behavior off by default so a cassandra cluster would be immune to data gain when nodes get restarted (at least with Leveled where Cassandra keeps track of SSTables).

This is sort of a follow-up to CASSANDRA-6503 (fixed in 1.2.14). We're just extremely nervous that orphan SSTables could appear because of some other potential problem somewhere else and cause zombie data on a random reboot.

Issue Links

• relates to: CASSANDRA-6568 sstables incorrectly getting marked as "not live"
• relates to: CASSANDRA-6503 sstables from stalled repair sessions become live after a reboot and can resurrect deleted data
• relates to: CASSANDRA-7066 Simplify (and unify) cleanup of compaction leftovers