How client-side timestamps work in Amazon Keyspaces
Amazon Keyspaces client-side timestamps are fully managed. You don’t have to manage low-level system settings such as clean-up and compaction strategies.
When you delete data, the rows are marked for deletion with a tombstone. Amazon Keyspaces removes tombstoned data automatically (typically within 10 days) without impacting your application performance or availability. Tombstoned data isn't available for data manipulation language (DML) statements. As you continue to perform reads and writes on rows that contain tombstoned data, the tombstoned data continues to count towards storage, read capacity units (RCUs), and write capacity units (WCUs) until it's deleted from storage.
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How client-side timestamps work in Amazon Keyspaces
When client-side timestamps are turned on in Amazon Keyspaces, every column of every row stores a timestamp. These timestamps take up approximately 20–40 bytes (depending on your data), and contribute to the storage and throughput cost for the row. These metadata bytes also count towards your 1-MB row size quota. To determine the overall increase in storage space (to ensure that the row size stays under 1 MB), consider the number of columns in your table and the number of collection elements in each row. For example, if a table has 20 columns, with each column storing 40 bytes of data, the size of the row increases from 800 bytes to 1200 bytes. For more information on how to estimate the size of a row, see Calculating row size in Amazon Keyspaces. In addition to the extra 400 bytes for storage, in this example, the number of write capacity units (WCUs) consumed per write increases from 1 WCU to 2 WCUs. For more information on how to calculate read and write capacity, see Read/write capacity modes in Amazon Keyspaces.
After client-side timestamps have been turned on for a table, you can't turn it off. In addition,
timestamps can't be NULL, so if no client-side timestamps are supplied by
the CQL statement or the client driver, a timestamp generated by Amazon Keyspaces is automatically
added.
Amazon Keyspaces client-side timestamps and integration with AWS services
The following client-side timestamps metric is available in Amazon CloudWatch to enable continuous monitoring.
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SystemReconciliationDeletes– The number of delete operations required to remove tombstoned data.
For more information about how to monitor CloudWatch metrics, see Monitoring Amazon Keyspaces with Amazon CloudWatch.
