title: How to increment a counter in Cassandra?
body: <p>I'd like to use Cassandra to store a counter. For example how many times a given page has been viewed.
  The counter will never decrement. The value of the counter does not need to be exact but it should be accurate over time.</p>
  
  <p>My first thought was to store the value as a column and just read the current count, increment it by one and then put it back in. However if another operation is also trying to increment the counter, I think the final value would just be the one with the latest timestamp.</p>
  
  <p>Another thought would be to store each page load as a new column in a CF. Then I could just run <code>get_count()</code> on that key and get the number of columns. Reading through the <a href="http://wiki.apache.org/cassandra/API" rel="noreferrer">documentation</a>, it appears that it is not a very efficient operation at all.</p>
  
  <p>Am I approaching the problem incorrectly?</p>