Tombstones

What are Tombstones?

An interesting case with Cassandra can be when we delete some data for a node that is down or unreachable, that node could miss a delete. When that node comes back online later and a repair occurs, the node could "resurrect" the data that had been previously deleted by re-sharing it with other nodes. To prevent deleted data from being reintroduced, Cassandra uses a concept called a tombstone. A tombstone is similar to the idea of a "soft delete" from the relational database world