How do you apply TTL to data in ScyllaDB?

Time-to-live (TTL) can be set per-write in seconds, either on an individual INSERT/UPDATE statement or as a table-wide default, after which the data is automatically marked for deletion.

INSERT INTO sessions (session_id, user_id, data)
VALUES (uuid(), 'user123', 'payload')
USING TTL 3600;  -- expires in 1 hour

CREATE TABLE cache (k text PRIMARY KEY, v text) WITH default_time_to_live = 86400;

Once a row or column's TTL elapses, it isn't deleted immediately; ScyllaDB writes a tombstone that marks it as expired, and the underlying data is physically removed later during compaction. TTL is a common building block for session data, caches, and rate-limiting counters, but heavy TTL usage benefits from the Time-Window Compaction Strategy, since TWCS is specifically designed to purge fully-expired SSTables efficiently.

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