Column Families

When creating a ColumnFamily, it is possible to set garbage collection rules for expired data.

By setting a rule, cells in the table matching the rule will be deleted during periodic garbage collection (which executes opportunistically in the background).

The types MaxAgeGCRule, MaxVersionsGCRule, GarbageCollectionRuleUnion and GarbageCollectionRuleIntersection can all be used as the optional gc_rule argument in the ColumnFamily constructor. This value is then used in the create() and update() methods.

These rules can be nested arbitrarily, with a MaxAgeGCRule or MaxVersionsGCRule at the lowest level of the nesting:

import datetime

max_age = datetime.timedelta(days=3)
rule1 = MaxAgeGCRule(max_age)
rule2 = MaxVersionsGCRule(1)

# Make a composite that matches anything older than 3 days **AND**
# with more than 1 version.
rule3 = GarbageCollectionIntersection(rules=[rule1, rule2])

# Make another composite that matches our previous intersection
# **OR** anything that has more than 3 versions.
rule4 = GarbageCollectionRule(max_num_versions=3)
rule5 = GarbageCollectionUnion(rules=[rule3, rule4])

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