Debugging SSTables in 3.0 with sstabledump

Cassandra 3.0.4 and 3.4 introduces sstabledump, a new utility for exploring SSTables. It replaces sstable2json, which was removed from Cassandra in version 3.0. The new tool can export SSTable content to human-readable JSON format. In contrast to previous versions of Cassandra, SSTables are now composed of partitions and their rows, with metadata such as clustering key values, timestamps, and TTLs defined at the row level. This change leads to a more understandable representation and a reduced storage footprint for SSTables. sstabledump supports Cassandra 3.X SSTables and can be executed outside of the Cassandra environment without requiring cassandra.yaml in the classpath. The utility provides both JSON and 'debug' output formats, with the latter being more concise and convenient for advanced users to analyze SSTable contents.