Hi, I'm using HBase for a project in which I have very few columns in each table with greatly varying lengths. For example, in one table I might have one column with 1 million rows of data and one column with 100. In other words, there will be a lot of null cells in each table.
What I'm wondering is how these null cells are treated when the table is read into memory using the scan operation? I'm assuming they are read into a buffer, found to be null, then discarded, but I'm not really sure what is happening within the system during the scan. Will a large number of null cells noticeably slow down the scan or are they handled very quickly? Would it be too expensive to have a single table with a lot of nulls vs. having multiple tables with very few? Thanks, CM
