Question

Im trying to store a list,collection of data objects in Hbase. For example ,a User table where a the userId is the Rowkey and column family Contacts with column Contacts:EmailIds where EmailIds is a list of emails as

{[e-mail],[e-mail]....etc}

How do we model this in Hbase ? How do we do this in Java?/Python?Ive tried pickling and unpickling data in Python but this is one solution which I do not want to use due to performance issues.

Answer 1

You can use it in the following manner:

| userid | contacts                                              |
| test   | c:email1=[e-mail]; c:email2=[e-mail] |

or

| userid | contacts                                              |
| test   | c:[e-mail]=1; c:[e-mail]=2           |

This way you can use versioning, add/remove as much email addresses as you want, use filters, and it is really easy to iterate over these KV pairs in the client code