Saying that Accumulo is a multi-map, because you can think of it that way by not considering timestamps part of the key (which they are) and because the versioning iterator is turned on be default will only confuse users. Especially those who read the BigTable paper, or hear about the BigTable data model, or who are familiar with the concept of a key-value store, and decide to try to use Accumulo.
> The second challenge is that the overlay is persisted and is not > reversible. Aggregators don't keep the Keys that they aggregate, so if a > user wants to replace a Key in the underlying map and have that replacement > operation be reflected in the overlay, we can't really do that. However, we > can do that if the underlying store is a multi-map (which is what we do > now). > > Adam
