Cassandra maintain insert and update timestamp - cassandra

Question

I have a table which maintains data for products.
I update this table from after making an API call every few mins.
Say I have this table.
create table products(
id int,
name text,
created timestamp,
updated timestamp,
primary_key(id)
);
So I make an API call at time 00:00:00 and I get list of products
[
{id:1, name:'product1'},
{id:2, name:'product2'}
]
I insert it to my cassandra table
id | name | created | updated
1 | Product1 | 1/1/2018 00:00:00| 1/1/2018 00:00:00
2 | Product2 | 1/1/2018 00:00:00| 1/1/2018 00:00:00
Now in the second API call after 10 mins the user has deleted Product1, but created Product3 so I get the API call output as
[
{id:2, name:'product2'},
{id:3, name:'product3'}
]
I will upsert this in my cassandra table(since I don't want to check if the record exists before deciding whether to insert or update) but I want to maintain the created time of product2 in my upset query so that I know when the product was created and what was the lifetime of the product.
Is it possible for me to maintain the created timestamp by setting it now() without specifying it in the query and then I keep updating the updatetime value?
My table should look like this
id | name | created | updated
1 | Product1 | 1/1/2018 00:00:00 | 1/1/2018 00:00:00
2 | Product2 | 1/1/2018 00:00:00 | 1/1/2018 00:00:10
3 | Product3 | 1/1/2018 00:00:10 | 1/1/2018 00:00:10

Answer 1

TL;DR; Yes.
You'll have to know what columns to invoke during the upsert, that will be the only logic that will be pushed to the application side, but the data model can work exactly as you expected.
CREATE TABLE KS.products (
id int PRIMARY KEY,
created timestamp,
name text,
updated timestamp
)
INSERT INTO products (id, name, created, updated)
VALUES (1, 'TTzV2', toTimeStamp(now()), toTimeStamp(now()));
INSERT INTO products (id, name, created, updated)
VALUES (2, 'smLL301', toTimeStamp(now()), toTimeStamp(now()));
SELECT * FROM KS.products;
id | created | name | updated
----+---------------------------------+---------+---------------------------------
1 | 2018-09-28 17:22:38.502000+0000 | TTzV2 | 2018-09-28 17:22:38.502000+0000
2 | 2018-09-28 17:22:39.180000+0000 | smLL301 | 2018-09-28 17:22:39.180000+0000
Now after the product is updated you'll need to specialize your API to call something else, but with the following CQL you can get what you expected:
INSERT INTO products (id, updated) VALUES (2, toTimeStamp(now()));
INSERT INTO products (id, name, created, updated)
VALUES (3, 'Gt3X', toTimeStamp(now()), toTimeStamp(now()));
SELECT * FROM KS.products;
id | created | name | updated
----+---------------------------------+---------+---------------------------------
1 | 2018-09-28 17:22:38.502000+0000 | TTzV2 | 2018-09-28 17:22:38.502000+0000
2 | 2018-09-28 17:22:39.180000+0000 | smLL301 | 2018-09-28 17:25:38.208000+0000
3 | 2018-09-28 17:25:38.774000+0000 | Gt3X | 2018-09-28 17:25:38.774000+0000