title: Wondering what is dropped timestams in sstablemetadata output in cassandra
body: <p>The Datastax docs <a href="https://docs.datastax.com/en/cassandra/2.1/cassandra/tools/toolsSSTableMetadata.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">here</a> say: </p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>The sstablemetadata utility prints metadata about a specified SSTable. The utility displays metadata that includes:</p>
    
    <p>...</p>
    
    <p>number of tombstones and Dropped timestamps (in epoch time)</p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p>So I was wondering what does this value mean?</p>