HBase column families: how many?

Question

Probably there are a lot of similar questions but they dont' answer to my scenario (at least I'm not able to get the point).

• I have, lets say, a table in HBase with 4 column families. Main reason is that each column family has different VERSIONS attribute (very different).

• All column of all families are not storing big data (such for example fulltexts) but an average of 1KB (identifiers that are long, some short strings, integers and so on)

• I need to access data in several ways: scan and get by column family, get all cells of a given row by version (specific version or a range), and last but not least: get the latest version of all columns of a given row.

So, what are, in this scenario, the disadvantages of having 4 column families? Does reads are less efficient because they operate (in case the row is not in memory) on different store files?

Answer 1

As per Apache HBase wiki Hbase will face performance issues more than 2 or 3 Column families.