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https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HBASE-4489?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel&focusedCommentId=13126282#comment-13126282
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Jonathan Gray commented on HBASE-4489:
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Historically ASCII has proven a bad choice in key design. If it's always fixed
length, it's less of a big deal and really does come down to space savings vs.
readability. In many applications, row keys are composite keys made up of many
different things. Often times, the key may be preceded by some fixed-length
random hash of some sort.
I almost always want to be building these composite keys from fixed-length
binary ints/longs and such, rather than fixed-length ascii characters.
If we are talking a straightforward key-val situation with a string-like key,
then the usability of ASCII would make sense.
> Better key splitting in RegionSplitter
> --------------------------------------
>
> Key: HBASE-4489
> URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HBASE-4489
> Project: HBase
> Issue Type: Improvement
> Affects Versions: 0.90.4
> Reporter: Dave Revell
> Assignee: Dave Revell
> Attachments: HBASE-4489-branch0.90-v1.patch,
> HBASE-4489-branch0.90-v2.patch, HBASE-4489-branch0.90-v3.patch,
> HBASE-4489-trunk-v1.patch, HBASE-4489-trunk-v2.patch,
> HBASE-4489-trunk-v3.patch
>
>
> The RegionSplitter utility allows users to create a pre-split table from the
> command line or do a rolling split on an existing table. It supports
> pluggable split algorithms that implement the SplitAlgorithm interface. The
> only/default SplitAlgorithm is one that assumes keys fall in the range from
> ASCII string "00000000" to ASCII string "7FFFFFFF". This is not a sane
> default, and seems useless to most users. Users are likely to be surprised by
> the fact that all the region splits occur in in the byte range of ASCII
> characters.
> A better default split algorithm would be one that evenly divides the space
> of all bytes, which is what this patch does. Making a table with five regions
> would split at \x33\x33..., \x66\x66...., \x99\x99..., \xCC\xCC..., and
> \xFF\xFF.
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