Atomicity in Cassandra
In Cassandra, a write is atomic at the row-level, meaning inserting or updating columns for a given row key will be treated as one write operation. Cassandra does not support transactions in the sense of bundling multiple row updates into one all-or-nothing operation. Nor does it roll back when a write succeeds on one replica, but fails on other replicas. It is possible in Cassandra to have a write operation report a failure to the client, but still actually persist the write to a replica.
For example, if using a write consistency level of QUORUM with a replication factor of 3, Cassandra will send the write to 2 replicas. If the write fails on one of the replicas but succeeds on the other, Cassandra will report a write failure to the client. However, the write is not automatically rolled back on the other replica.
Cassandra uses timestamps to determine the most recent update to a column. The timestamp is provided by the client application. The latest timestamp always wins when requesting data, so if multiple client sessions update the same columns in a row concurrently, the most recent update is the one that will eventually persist