Maybe you are already headed in the right direction as far as concatenated row keys: in any case following comes to mind from your post:
Partitioning key likely consists of your reverse timestamp plus the most frequently queried natural key - would that be the email? Let us suppose so: then choose to make the prefix based on which of the two (reverse timestamp vs email) provides most balanced / non-skewed distribution of your data. That makes your region servers happier.
Choose based on better balanced distribution of records:
reverse timestamp plus most frequently queried natural key
e.g. reversetimestamp-email
or email-reversetimestamp
In that manner you will avoid hot spotting on your region servers.
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To obtain good performance on the additional (secondary ) indexes, that is not "baked into" hbase yet: they have a design doc for it (look under SecondaryIndexing in the wiki).
But you can build your own a couple of ways:
a) use coprocessor to write the item_type as rowkey to separate tabole with a column containing the original (user_email-reverse timestamp (or vice-versa) fact table rowke
b) if disk space not issue and/or the rows are small, just go ahead and duplicate the entire row in the second (and third for the item-id case) tables.
emailanditem_typemandatory inwherestatement? Do you have statements likeselect * from table where email = "xyz"orselect * from table where item_type=2? And you have mentioned you want to "Get all results of particular item_id" in your post. I don't see it from your SQL. - ericson