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?开发者_如何转开发 Is this a problem?

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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