How can I skip HBase rows that are missing specific column family?

Question

For example, a HBase table has columnFamilyA, columnFamilyB and columnFamilyC, for some rows, columnFamilyA does not have any column in it. I would like to scan the table and return only the rows that have at least one column in columnFamilyA.

What kind of filter should I use? I checked SingleColumnValueFilter, but it seems to only work with specific column other than columnFamily. I need all rows where columnFamiliyA contains at least one column. Not just data in columnFamiliyA, but the entire row.

Answer 1

If you need only data from columnFamiliyA you can use addFamily method on Get or Scan objects.

Answer 2

Or you can do scan of scan. First do scan for columFamilyA cols. Then get the rows of first scan.