Table of Contents
In short, applications store data into an HBase table. Tables are made of rows and columns. All columns in HBase belong to a particular column family. Table cells -- the intersection of row and column coordinates -- are versioned. A cell’s content is an uninterpreted array of bytes.
Table row keys are also byte arrays so almost anything can serve as a row key from strings to binary representations of longs or even serialized data structures. Rows in HBase tables are sorted by row key. The sort is byte-ordered. All table accesses are via the table row key -- its primary key.
The following example is a slightly modified form of the one on page 2 of the BigTable paper. There
is a table called
webtable that contains two column families named
anchor. In this example,
anchor contains two columns (
contents contains one column
By convention, a column name is made of its column family prefix and a
qualifier. For example, the column
contents:html is made up of the column family
html qualifier. The colon character
:) delimits the column family from the column family
Table 5.1. Table
|Row Key||Time Stamp||ColumnFamily ||ColumnFamily |