Like most things in big table, it really depends on your use case. The column family can potentially control the location of a given key/value pair on disk.
I wouldn't say it's necessarily more useful than any other part of the key tuple. We have some built-ins that make searching for or suppressing column families easier. They matter more when in a locality group, as there are potential performance gains there. On Thu, Jul 10, 2014 at 10:01 PM, David Medinets <david.medin...@gmail.com> wrote: > In a recent conversation, someone mentioned that the Column Family is > especially useful in custom iterators. Unfortunately I was not able to > follow up to get details. Can anyone share a use case showing how > information in a Column Family is better inside an iterator than > information in another part of the Accumulo key? >
