Are there any plans for including a Filter for Delete? Currently, the only way seems to be via checkAndDelete in HTable/Table. This is helpful but does not cover all use cases.
For e.g., I use column qualifier prefixes as a sort of poor man's 2rd level of indexing (i.e, 3 levels of indexing comprising row key --> column qualifier prefix --> column qualifier suffix). This works well for Get and Scan, since I can use a prefix column qualifier filter for the 2nd indexing level. However, I am not able to specify that an entire set of column qualifiers sharing the same prefix should be deleted, without doing a Get first to identify all the full column qualifier values with the same prefix, and then adding those qualifiers to the Delete. This is obviously highly inefficient. checkAndDelete doesn't help here since it does not support prefix tests. Moreover, I cannot just add a new column family for every unique column qualifier prefix I need in my data model. In general, using just one column family per table seems to be most efficient. I can think of other use cases where one would need to delete a lot of columns that match one of the available HBase filters, but whose exact column qualifier values are not known at deletion time at the client. All these uses cases can be taken care of by allowing Delete to support a setFilter method, exactly as in the case of Get and Scan.
