Cassandra deals with this build-up of SSTables over time by means of a process called compaction. Compaction aggregates rows from multiple files into a single file, and in the process it removes old data and purges tombstones. However, housekeeping is only one reason to do this; the other objective is to improve read performance by moving data for a given key into a single SSTable, thereby reducing the disk I/O required to read each key.
The exact mechanism that governs the compaction process depends on which compaction strategy you choose. There are three strategies that currently ship with Cassandra (although you can implement your own):
Size-tiered compaction: This strategy causes SSTables to be compacted when there are multiple files of a similar size (the default is four). In update-heavy workloads, a row may exist in many SSTables at once, resulting in reduced read performance.
Leveled compaction: This strategy assigns SSTables to levels, where each level represents...