Hbase One Store = Column Family?

Question

Everyone,

I am wondering if anyone can give a quick-and-dirty answer if one column family in a Hbase table could have more than one store.

I have read many articles and it sounds like Region is containing multiple stores and each store corresponds to one column family.

What would happen if a store gets over the 10GB default size and gets split into multiple stores ? In this case, a column family could have multiple stores?

I am confused...

Neil Neil · Accepted Answer · 2013-10-15T13:52:58

The HBase Book (http://hbase.apache.org/book/regions.arch.html) explains it better than I could:

Table       (HBase table)
Region       (Regions for the table)
     Store          (Store per ColumnFamily for each Region for the table)
          MemStore           (MemStore for each Store for each Region for the table)
          StoreFile          (StoreFiles for each Store for each Region for the table)
                Block             (Blocks within a StoreFile within a Store for each Region for the table)

So, one column family can have more than one store, if it is split across multiple regions. When a single store file (within a store) gets above the threshold, a region split occurs -- so the store does not get split, the region does.

Hope that clarifies things!

Hbase One Store = Column Family?

1 Answers