You do realize that everything you store in Hbase are byte arrays, right? That is each cell is a blob.
So you have the ability to create nested structures like… JSON records? ;-) So to your point. You can have a column A which represents a set of values. This is one reason why you shouldn’t think of HBase in terms of being relational. In fact for Hadoop, you really don’t want to think in terms of relational structures. Think more of Hierarchical. So yes, you can do what you want to do… HTH -Mike On Sep 8, 2014, at 10:06 PM, Stephen Boesch <[email protected]> wrote: > While I am aware that HBase does not have native support for nested > structures, surely there are some of you that have thought through this use > case carefully. > > Our particular use case is likely having single digit nested layers with > tens to hundreds of items in the lists at each level. > > An example would be a > > top Level 300 items > middle level : 1 to 100 items ("1 value" may indicate a single value as > opposed to a list) > third level: 1 to 50 items > fourth level 1 to 20 items > > The column names are likely known ahead of time- which may or may not > matter for hbase. We could model the above structure in a Parquet File or > in Hive (with nested struct's)- but we would like to consider whether > HBase.might also be an option.
