> > > Does this make any sense? > > Not in a MapReduce context, what you want to do is a LIKE with a bunch of values right? Since a mapper will always read all the input that it's given (minus some filters like you can do with HBase), whatever you do will always end up being a full table scan. You "could" solve your problem by configuring your Scan object with a RowFilter that knows about the names you are looking for, but that still ends up being a full scan on the region server side so it will be slow and will generate a lot of IO.
WRT examples, HBase ships with a couple of utility classes that can also be used as examples. The Export class has the Scan configuration stuff: http://github.com/apache/hbase/blob/0.20/src/java/org/apache/hadoop/hbase/mapreduce/Export.java J-D
