This is actually a serious question. I need to derive change information from versioned data in Hbase. So in particular I need to find out whether a specific column value was deleted during some time range.
The way delete works currently, as far as I can tell, the only way to achieve a "delete" state at some point in time is to put a value and delete it again right away (Delete.deleteColumn). All other ways of using Delete remove a column from other versions, i.e. modify the version history, which is exactly what I do not want to achieve. I experimented with setting column values to null as a delete marker, but that didn't work as expected either (returns byte array of length 0 when retrieving - which really has different semantics). Is there any better way of "putting" a delete state on a column? Thanks, Henning
