column based or row based for HBase

Question

I am wondering whether HBase is using column based storage or row based storage?

• I read some technical documents and mentioned advantages of HBase is using column

Answer 1

In addition to Ian's excellent answer, I would opine that HBase is both a row-based key-value, as well as a column-based key-value store (if you know the row-key).

If you prefer to think of it in terms of data structures, here's what a simple HBase table could look like:

'rowkey1' => {
    'c:col1' => 'value1',
    'c:col2' => 'value2',
},
'rowkey2' => {
    'c:col1' => 'value10',
    'c:col3' => 'value3'
}

Of course, you can also store even more complicated data-structures in it, as you can see from Ian's presentation.