title: Is it possible to use a cassandra table as a basic queue
body: <p>Is it possible to use a table in cassandra as a queue, I don't think the strategy I use in mysql works, ie given this table:</p>
  
  <pre><code>create table message_queue(id integer, message varchar(4000), retries int, sending boolean);
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>We have a transaction that marks the row as "sending", tries to send, and then either deletes the row, or increments the retries count. The transaction ensures that only one server will be attempting to process an item from the message_queue at any one time.</p>
  
  <p>There is an article <a href="http://www.datastax.com/dev/blog/cassandra-anti-patterns-queues-and-queue-like-datasets" rel="noreferrer">on datastax</a> that describes the pitfalls and how to get around it, however Im not sure what the impact of having lots of tombstones lying around is, how long do they stay around for?</p>