What is the purpose of the Delete operation in RocksDB?

Delete marks a key as removed, rather than immediately erasing any existing data for that key from disk.

• Writes a special marker, often called a tombstone, associated with that key, rather than searching for and physically removing prior values right away
• The tombstone is what later reads use to know the key should be treated as absent
• The actual underlying data is only physically removed later, during compaction

This deferred approach fits the LSM-tree's append-only write philosophy, deletion becomes just another kind of write, rather than requiring an immediate, potentially expensive search-and-remove operation.

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