Update of value for a given name

[A J <s5...@gmail.com>]

If I update a column (i.e. change the value contents for a given name in a
given key), is the physical disk operation equivalent to delete followed by
insert.
Or is it just insert somehow making the last value marked as stale ?

In the definite guide, it says the following about SSTable:
*All writes are sequential, which is the primary reason that writes perform
so well in Cassandra. No reads or seeks of any kind are required for writing
a value to Cassandra because all writes are append operations.*
*
*
It made me wonder how updates work, if it is append only.

I am new to cassandra so please let me know if I am missing something basic.

Regards,
-AJ

Re: Update of value for a given name

[Tyler Hobbs <ty...@datastax.com>]

This may help clear things up for you:

http://wiki.apache.org/cassandra/MemtableSSTable

-- 
Tyler Hobbs
Software Engineer, DataStax <http://datastax.com/>
Maintainer of the pycassa <http://github.com/pycassa/pycassa> Cassandra
Python client library