Hello community, In our deployments, we usually rebuild the Cassandra datacenters for maintenance or recovery operations. The procedure used since the days of Cassandra 3.x was the one documented in datastax documentation. Decommissioning a datacenter | Apache Cassandra 3.x (datastax.com)<https://docs.datastax.com/en/cassandra-oss/3.x/cassandra/operations/opsDecomissionDC.html> After upgrading to Cassandra 4.1.4, we have realized that there are some stricter rules that do not allo to remove the replication when active Cassandra nodes still exist in a datacenter. This check makes the above-mentioned procedure obsolete. I am thinking to use the following as an alternative:
1. Make sure no clients are still writing to any nodes in the datacenter. 2. Run a full repair with nodetool repair. 3. Run nodetool decommission using the --force option on every node in the datacenter being removed. 4. Change all keyspaces so they no longer reference the datacenter being removed. What is the procedure followed by other users? Do you see any risk following the proposed procedure? BR MK
