Advice on how to delete range of rows / key-only scanning

[Henning Blohm]

Hi,

  I need to delete a range of rows from an HBase table. A time-to-live
setting as proposed in 

http://www.mail-archive.com/hbase-u...@hadoop.apache.org/msg09492.html

will not do as there will be no clear point in time when that clean up
will be required / adviced.

The way it is implemented now essentially looks like this:

                        HTable c = _table(<table>);
                        Scan s = new Scan("".getBytes(),endKey.getBytes());
                        s.addColumn(<family>.getBytes());
                        ResultScanner rs = c.getScanner(s);
                        try {
                                Result r;
                                while ((r=rs.next())!=null) {
                                        c.delete(new Delete(r.getRow()));
                                }
                        } finally {
                                rs.close();
                        }
                        c.flushCommits();

While that works, it is suboptimal as it seems to require to define a
column or column family 
to retrieve data for. Worse: It seems that a column is required that is
always present to 
really hit all relevant rows.

However, all that is required is the keys!

I found https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HBASE-1481 and was
wondering whether
there has been any progress on that. 

What is the best way to accomplish something like key-only scanning?

Thanks,
  Henning