Lightweight transactions and their cost

Lightweight transactions allow us to maintain data integrity in the face of concurrent updates, but they don't do it for free. Because of Cassandra's distributed architecture, it actually goes to great lengths to guarantee that the data is in a certain state before modifying it, as all the machines that store that piece of data need to be in agreement.

Accordingly, there's a performance penalty in using lightweight transactions. As a result, you shouldn't use them in situations where you don't need to.

When lightweight transactions aren't necessary

As we discussed earlier, concurrent insertions aren't a concern for any table that uses UUIDs that are generated by the application or by Cassandra...