Excellent, thank you William. That raises an interesting point for me. In my case, as with the IntersectingIterator, the schema of my iterator's topKey and topValue is not the same as the schema for the underlying source.
In IntersectingIterator, for example, the underlying source has data in the format; row: shardID, colfam: term, colqual: docID But the data being returned by the iterator is in the form row: shardID, colfam: (empty), colqual: docID Would I expect a seek on that iterator to have a range based on the ColF and ColQ being returned, or the ones being used on the sources? It appears from the code of IntersectingIterator that seek is called based on the out-going schema, and the code then translates the keys in the range into the source schema before seeking the sources. Thanks, Tejay From: William Slacum [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Thursday, September 13, 2012 4:39 PM To: [email protected] Subject: EXTERNAL: Re: Iterators and seeking the middle of a row Another thing to keep in mind is that the documentation is actually meant to enforce the notion that, between returning keys, your iterator could be destroyed and reconstituted. If an iterator is originally given a range, ("a", "c"), and it returns a key "b", the system *may* deconstruct the iterator stack and at a later time, reinitialize it with the range ("b", "c"), since "b" was the last place your iterator stack was known to be at. On Thu, Sep 13, 2012 at 3:34 PM, William Slacum <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: Remember that the range given to an iterator is, at some point in time, user set. If a client only wants to scan between keys K1 and K2, and each occur in the same row, then the iterator should not be considering data that is outside of the range supplied to it. Someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but I also believe that if a client received a key outside of the original scan range, then that was considered a termination condition and the scan would stop. Let's say I have a flat record structure for people, where the row is the name of the person, the column family is some attribute about them, and the column qualifier is the value for that attribute. Here's a record for Bob: Bob eyes: blue Bob hair: brown Bob height: tall Bob pants: brown Bob shirt: white Bob tie: blue If you were searching for all attributes that were 'brown', you could do a look up using the range `new Range("Bob", "Bob")`. Your iterator would be able to see all of Bob and return to the user his hair and pants color. However, you could just as easily perform your look up with `new Range(new Key("Bob", "height"), new Key("Bob", "z"))`*. Your iterator would then be allowed to look at a subset of Bob, starting at his height and continuing until the end of his record. * I used "z" because it sorts lexicographically after the other attributes. On Thu, Sep 13, 2012 at 1:01 PM, Keith Turner <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: On Thu, Sep 13, 2012 at 3:50 PM, Cardon, Tejay E <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: > The javadoc for SortedKeyValueIterator.seek states: > > "Iterators that examine groups of adjacent key/value pairs (e.g. rows) to > determine their top key and value should be sure that they properly handle a > seek to a key in the middle of such a group (e.g. the middle of a row). Even > if the client always seeks to a range containing an entire group (a,c), the > tablet server could send back a batch of entries corresponding to (a,b], > then reseek the iterator to range (b,c) when the scan is continued." > > > > However, it gives no indication of what proper handling is. What should an > iterator that considers and entire row do in this case? Does it simply > ignore the row? Attempt to seek its source iterator to the full row of the > first range? I'm struggling to understand the best approach here org.apache.accumulo.core.iterators.user.RowFilter does what you suggested. It seeks to the beggining of a row if the range starts in the middle of the row. Look at the javadoc for the row filter, it discusses the seeking behavior. > > > > In my specific case, if it matters, I'm largely looking for ColumnQualifiers > which exist in all Column Families in a given set (intersecting iterator, > sortof). > > > > Thanks, > Tejay
