How to count number of tombstones per partition key in one or multiple sstables.

tombstone-count.sh

#!/bin/bash
#
# Counts number of tombstones per partition key in one or multiple sstables.
#
# Usage: ./tombstone-count.sh /var/lib/cassandra/data/mykeyspace/mytable/*-Data.db
#
# Sample output:
#    "40e6a9839bf44bdaa624cc53e96733fe" 8
#    "8e177ab222c14f868bcb6d2922b18d2b" 8
#    "28aaa9db0dad4ae78cabe8bcc25d14a3" 9
#    "8367c6c14d8e4ccdbd14e85d4a7d3b1f" 9
#    "ecaf2f2409b24fa990a18e79f05b4b30" 12
#    "3294ffc4dad44853b675dfdb34911576" 13
# (partition keys without any tombstone(s) are not printed).

# Get `jq` here: http://stedolan.github.io/jq/download/
# ltrim taken from http://stackoverflow.com/a/27158086/260805

# The various stages below:
# 1. Choose which file(s) you'd like to check tombstones for here.
# 2. Convert to JSON.
# 3. Count tombstones per primary key.
# 4. Convert from JSON to CSV.
# 5. Sum duplicates of primary keys.
# 6. Sort by the primary key with the most tombstones.
ls "$@" \
  | xargs --verbose -L 1 sstable2json \
  | jq '.[] | {key: .key, length: [.columns[] | select(.[3]=="t")] | length }' \
  | awk -F: 'function ltrim(s) { sub(/^[ \t\r\n]+/, "", s); return s } /"key"/ {key=$2;} /"length"/ && $2>0 {print ltrim(key), ltrim($2);}' \
  | awk -F, '!($1 in myarr) { myarr[$1]=0 } {myarr[$1] += $2;} END {for(i in myarr) print i, myarr[i];}' \
  | sort -n -k 2

Find an updated version for Cassandra 3.0.x at https://gist.github.com/fholzer/d6b7f1ce98906b5730cae67c179e0dd2