It is a bit unusual, I think. To begin with, the number of versions is set when you create a ColumnFamily - so, you are signing up for every column in that column family having 1500 versions which you may or may not want.
Secondly, if your goal is to select a specific one of those email addresses, how can you select from these versioned values (e.g. to select the "home" email ... what do you do?) A good read on time versioning is: http://outerthought.org/blog/417-ot/version/2 which also points out some gotchas. Finally, I'm always a bit leery (or careful?) towards using features that are not intended to be used in such ways - a lot of things hang off of the hbase cell time versioning (major_compactions, delete markers, replication, etc etc all use the cell's time version to determine state) ... so, using it in unusual ways may bring up some gotchas. It is an interesting question, though - if anyone of the list has tried such things, it would be good to hear about it. --Suraj On Fri, Mar 11, 2011 at 10:49 AM, Rickm <[email protected]> wrote: > Suraj Varma <svarma.ng@...> writes: >> >> It really depends on your access patterns. >> One option could be having column names as email_<type> and the value as >> email address. (e.g email_home:user@..., email_work:user@..., >> etc). This will allow you to select specific emails (e.g. email_home and >> email_work) in your Get. >> >> Or if you prefer having both type and email address as values, you'd have to >> resort to a straight marshalling of the List<> as column names >> email_type_1:value=<type>, email_address_1:value=<address>. This would be >> appropriate if you always want the full set and you plan to reconstitute >> your List<> in full each time. >> >> --Suraj >> > What if you have a column like {NAME =>'address', VERSIONS =>50) and you store > in each version a different email address. Is using the column versioning in > this way a bad thing? Is there any limitation or constraints on the number of > versions for a column. I was thinking to define VERSION=>1500 on a column. Any > drawbacks using it in this way? > > I will much appreciate your answer. > Thanks in advance. > > >
