Implala documentation says for best performance use the string data type for HBase row keys. I know that you do not have to define the data types for Drill queries , but do string bytes work better for drill queries on hbase row keys ?
http://www.cloudera.com/content/cloudera/en/documentation/cloudera-impala/latest/topics/impala_hbase.html For best performance of Impala queries against HBase tables, most queries will perform comparisons in the WHERE against the column that corresponds to the HBase row key. When creating the table through the Hive shell, use the STRING data type for the column that corresponds to the HBase row key. Impala can translate conditional tests (through operators such as =, <, BETWEEN, and IN) against this column into fast lookups in HBase, but this optimization ("predicate pushdown") only works when that column is defined as STRING.
