Q: Cassandra - Impact of configuring ColumnFamilies I'm in the process of researching into various NoSQL technologies and currently looking into Cassandra (so I'm at a beginner level with regard to this!).
My understanding is you have to define ColumnFamilies in a config file - if you want to change a column family or add a new one, you have to restart Cassandra. What I'd like to know is what is the overall impact of this, in particular with regard to "downtime"?
e.g.
- presumably every node you have Cassandra running on, needs to be reconfigured and restarted
- suppose you have 10 nodes - how does it work if 5 nodes have been updated/restarted but the other 5 haven't? Is this a problem? 

A: This is one (of many) things that will be addressed in the upcoming release; 0.7.
Please read the wiki page about live schema updates
