Hi all,
I have come across a rather old issue
https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HBASE-5268, which is marked as
Won't fix and I would like to open a discussion about the topic
described. I understand the difficulties that the full implementation
brings to the get/scan process, but I think that the use-case described
in the JIRA might be beneficial to a lot of use-cases. My question is,
whether the problem of retrieving the deletion marker for a prefix of a
qualifier could be solved by introducing some structure to the qualifier
itself. Let me elaborate on this:
- suppose we give qualified a structure, say in a form of
`<prefix>.<suffix>`, with a fixed delimiter character (.)
- delete operation would be allowed only on the <suffix> part, and
will therefore be written as a "delete prefix" marker on qualifier
`<prefix>.`
- a get operation on a qualifier containing the delimiter character
(might be configurable), would then have to fetch only the row start (to
be able to determine whether the row as a whole was not deleted) and
then delete marker for the qualifier `<prefix>.`
I think this implementation would not suffer from the issues described
in the original JIRA and would be still practically usable for users,
while being a lot more efficient then what listing all the qualifiers
being actually written and deleting then one by one.
Thanks for any comments or insights.
Best,
Jan
