Ryan, You are currently only storing the latest nickname, not all 3? I'm trying to understand your use case exactly.
Whether you want to use versions or not depends on what you want to do with these multiple values. Versions are intended for versioning, as in, multiple values for the same column that are timestamped and sorted with most recent first. It seems from what you said that versions will work nicely. With the new API in the upcoming 0.20, there is much better support dealing with multiple versions. JG On Mon, June 1, 2009 6:10 pm, Ryan J. McDonough wrote: > I'm trying to get some clarity on the role of versions in HBase. Our > table design is such that a an object can have multiple property values for > a given property name. For example, we could have an nickname property > that a given person is known by. In the current set up, if a person has 3 > nicknames, only the last one gets stored. We have considered using the > column versions as an added data dimension, but that just doesn't feel > quite right. Given that columns have a limit (granted that it's quite > large) as to how many versions it can store, it's still a limit none the > less. > > From what I gather from reading the BigTable doc, is that version > could be considered a form of optimistic locking so that concurrent writes > don't conflict. Is that understanding correct? If not, is using versions > as an added data dimension a good idea? > > Ryan- > > >
