Question about slicing

[William Katsak <wk...@cs.rutgers.edu>]

Hello,

I am working on some experimental modifications to Cassandra and I was 
wondering if someone can help me with an easy answer to this:

Say I have a column family in the system keyspace where I am keeping 
some bookkeeping data (couple hundred thousand columns) at times.

I don't want to load all of the columns into memory before operating on 
them, so I can slice by some limit at a time:

         ColumnFamilyStore store = 
Table.open(Table.SYSTEM_TABLE).getColumnFamilyStore(MY_CF);

         if (store.isEmpty())
             return null;

         ByteBuffer rowKey = GreenCassandraConsistencyManager.MY_ROW;
         DecoratedKey<?> epkey = 
StorageService.getPartitioner().decorateKey(rowKey);
         QueryFilter filter = QueryFilter.getSliceFilter(epkey, path, 
startColumn, endColumn, false, limit);
         ColumnFamily cf = 
ColumnFamilyStore.removeDeleted(store.getColumnFamily(filter), 
(int)(System.currentTimeMillis() / 1000));

My question is, can I do something similar if I have thousands of 
*sub*columns. I am doing this:

         endpointColumn.getColumn(columnName).getSubColumns()), which 
returns a structure of all the subcolumns.

But this seems like it would load everything into memory at once. Can I 
easily slice this like I slice the regular columns?

Thanks,
Bill Katsak