Praveenesh, in addition to what Joey already said in another response to your question, see these chapters in the HBase book.
http://hbase.apache.org/book.html#schema http://hbase.apache.org/book.html#datamodel -----Original Message----- From: praveenesh kumar [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Friday, June 10, 2011 4:26 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Hbase rowkey question ? Hello guys..!! I am trying to understand hbase storing mechanism. but I am confused about hbase rowkey.. HBASE WIKI says its a byte array. But the way its represented I am not able to understand that. I have set my row key as a byte array of int numbers.. but when I am seeing it on hbase shell.. its coming in the following format... ROW COLUMN+CELL \x00\x00\x00\x00 column=details:page, timestamp=1307693977866, value=/a.html \x00\x00\x00\x01 column=details:page, timestamp=1307693977866, value=/ \x00\x00\x00\x02 column=details:page, timestamp=1307693977866, value=/ \x00\x00\x00\x03 column=details:page, timestamp=1307693977866, value=/b.html \x00\x00\x00\x04 column=details:page, timestamp=1307693977866, value=/ What is this "\x00\x00\x00\x00" thing. What does it represent ? How to interpret it ? Is '\x' some kind of delimiter between 2 bytes ? Does it mean size of rowkey is 5 Bytes ? Just I am wondering.. how can I get a particular row if I want ?.. I mean in regular rdbms we can search a row based on primary key.. how we can search a particular row here ? Thanks, Praveenesh
