I'm looking over the IsolatedScanner and wondering, since you've all probably thought more about it than I, whether loading a row entirely into memory is required to provide row isolation, or whether it simply makes it easier to implement.
The BigTable paper says it makes the rows in the memtable copy-on-write. Does this imply copying the entire row into memory first? That would seem to make read-modify-write operations simpler, but it doesn't seem a necessary condition for just writes ... In the future, is the intention to provide row-isolation upon request (via using the IsolatedScanner), thereby making non-atomic reads (via the Scanner) the default? Aaron
