Hi, I've been using HBase and now I'm looking at Cassandra. What's particularly interesting about Cassandra is its typed data model. Apparently it involves JSON, but what matters the most to me is that it makes storage of complex data types much easier. It is described here: http://project-voldemort.com/design.php about half-way down the page. Obviously JSON serialization & deserialization adds overhead but the ability to choose a strongly-typed storage format seems nice.
Any thoughts of this functionality in the HBase API? Not necessarily JSON in particular, but a pluggable serialization/ deserialization mechanism? I imagine this could be done completely on the client, but having something standard so every user doesn't have to roll their own (and having the same functionality in HB/MapReduce) would be nice. Thanks. -Tom
