Today we have a values map in HColumnDescriptor that maps strings of names to ints, booleans and strings. For a int value you make a string out of it, then you do getBytes on that string to get the bytes and finally new ImmutableBytesWritable to store it in the map. I'm not a big fan of the Text format and I'm happy that we are trying to get rid of it in as many places as possible but I think that this is one of the cases where is would actually make sense to keep them, so we don't have to create all these new objects just to write them and have something like a map<Text, Text> or map<Text, IntWritable>. If choosing the last option we need to convert the one place where strings are used for the values, compressiontype, to an int.
Regards Erik
