lsm-tombstone · shipping · also deletion marker, point tombstone

LSM tombstone

An LSM tombstone is a versioned deletion marker that suppresses older values for a key without immediately erasing their stored bytes.

A marker can remain necessary while an older table still contains a value it hides; removing the marker alone can expose obsolete data. Snapshot visibility can also require retaining old versions.

Relations

related

lsm-tree, sstable, range-tombstone, delete-persistence-latency

Citations

1. LevelDB project. Implementation: sorted tables and compaction. (accessed 2026-10-12)
2. RocksDB project. Snapshot: sequence numbers, point-in-time reads and lifetime. (accessed 2026-10-12)
3. LSM tombstones: deleted is not yet reclaimed (accessed 2026-10-12)

JSON: /data/terms/lsm-tombstone.json