title: Why don't an upsert create Tombstones in Cassandra?
body: <p>As per <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/31053406/overwrite-row-in-cassandra-with-insert-will-it-cause-tombstone">Question regarding Tombstone</a>, why doesn't upserts create tombstones?
  As per datastax documentation, <a href="http://docs.datastax.com/en/cassandra/3.x/cassandra/dml/dmlWriteUpdate.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">How is data updated ?</a> for every upsert, cassandra considers as delete followed by insert, as the new timestamps of the insert overwrites the old timestamp. The old timestamp data has to be marked as delete which relates to tombstone. </p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>Why do we have contradicting statements? or else am I missing anything here? </p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p>Usecase:
  Data is inserted with unique key (uuid) in Cassandra and some of the columns in this data keeps updating frequently. Which approach do you recommend?</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>Inserting the same data with new column values in the
  Insert query.</li>
  <li>Updating the existing record based on given uuid
  with new column values in the update query.</li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>Which approach does or doesn't create tombstones? and how does Cassandra handle both queries?</p>