Hbase row key size - can we use big row keys

["Srikanth P. Shreenivas" <Sr...@mindtree.com>]

Hi,

We are trying to design a HBase table, and we seem to be tending towards packing 3 fields into our row key, as we need to be able to do random access using these 3 fields.
The row key is turning out to be around 93 characters in size.

Is it okay to use a 100 character long row keys?  It will be great if you can share your experience/views of any problems we may run into if we do this.

Regards,
Srikanth




________________________________

http://www.mindtree.com/email/disclaimer.html

Re: Hbase row key size - can we use big row keys

[Stack <st...@duboce.net>]

On Wed, Jul 20, 2011 at 7:00 AM, Srikanth P. Shreenivas
<Sr...@mindtree.com> wrote:
> We are trying to design a HBase table, and we seem to be tending towards packing 3 fields into our row key, as we need to be able to do random access using these 3 fields.
> The row key is turning out to be around 93 characters in size.
>

Thats not too bad.

You can end up using lots of ram if you then have very small cells.
This section in the book is pretty good on the issues:
http://hbase.apache.org/book.html#keysize

St.Ack