We have discussed this in the past. It just came up again during an internal discussion. Currently we simply store a Java timestamp (millisec since epoch), i.e. we have ms resolution.
We do have 8 bytes for the TS, though. Not enough to store nanosecs (that would only cover 2^63/10^9/3600/24/365.24 = 292.279 years), but enough for microseconds (292279 years). Should we just store he TS is microseconds? We could do that right now (and just keep the ms resolution for now - i.e. the us part would always be 0 for now). Existing data must be in ms of course, so we'd grandfather that in, but new tables could store by default in us. We'd need to make this configurable both the column family level and client level, so clients could still opt to see data in ms. Comments? Too much to bite off? -- Lars
