On Mon, Jun 22, 2009 at 10:59 AM, Chris Goffinet<[email protected]> wrote: > But the thing is, BigTable uses 'Tables' as well. Calling it namespaces just > makes it even more confusing.
Well, (a) it's only confusing to people who have actually read the Bigtable paper, and they can cope. :P HBase and HyperTable haven't been religious about Bigtable nomenclature and it hasn't killed them. Especially since only a small fraction of the Bigtable paper is actually relevant to Cassandra I don't want to push that too hard as containing Our Official Vision. And namespace is really a better name. :P Another alternative is "schema," but to me that implies a more rigid, rdbms-like structure. Namespace just implies "keys in one namespace/table won't conflict with keys in another" which is exactly right. (And maybe it's a slight abuse of the term to add options like key ordering there but the more important Big Picture connotation is correct.) -Jonathan
