title: Cassandra 0.8 = What kind of "Row Count" features are provided?
body: <p>are "Row Counts" (in a CF) in Cassandra meanwhile supported for </p>
  
  <p>a) RAndomPartitioner ?</p>
  
  <p>b) OrderPreservingPartitioner?</p>
  
  <p><a href="http://www.datastax.com/dev/blog/whats-new-in-cassandra-0-8-part-2-counters" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://www.datastax.com/dev/blog/whats-new-in-cassandra-0-8-part-2-counters</a> implies this is easily possible? Quote: " “counting,” we mean here to provide an atomic increment operation in a single column value, as opposed to counting the number of columns in a row, or rows in a column family, both of which were already supported."</p>
  
  <p>Two years ago it was defenitely not supported for RP:
  <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1951843/row-count-of-a-column-family-in-cassandra">Row count of a column family in Cassandra</a></p>
  
  <p>Furthermoe even with OrderPreservingPartitioner, it was(??) a very heavy Operation (as far as I understood i have to retrieve all objects, this is/was not only a lightweight count operation to the row-count, but rather read also all data (rows?) ?)</p>
  
  <p>Update: I am absolutely aware of, that the new counting feature is completely different to row-counts. But the text above implies row-counts are also easily possible and supported quote "...both of which are supported..."? Is this marketing language meaning it is only possible as an extremely heaving operation using get_range_slice? Or is there something new that I am completly missing, that does this lightweight for both partitioniers? </p>
  
  <p>Thanks</p>
  
  <p>Markus</p>