We have Cassandra 1.1.1 servers with Leveled Compaction Strategy.
The system works so that there are read and delete operations. Every half a year we delete approximately half of the data while new data comes in. Sometimes it happens that disk usage goes up to 75% while we know that real data take about 40-50% other space is occupied by tombstones. To avoid disk overflow we force compaction of our tables by dropping all SSTables to Level 0. For that we remove .json manifest file and restart Cassandra node. (gc_grace option does not help since compaction starts only after level is filled)
Starting from Cassandra 2.0 the manifest file was moved to sstable file itself: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-4872
We are considering migration to Cassandra 2.x while we afraid we won't have such a possibility as forcing leveled compaction any more.
My question is: how could we achieve that our table has a disk space limit e.g. 150GB? (When the limit is exceeded it triggers compaction automatically). The question is mostly about Cassandra 2.x. While any alternative solutions for Cassandra 1.1.1 are also welcome.