First HBase does not have a concept of "row timestamp". Timestamp is part of each cell. The closest to row timestamp is probably the latest timestamp from all cells with same row key.
The reason that timestamp column need to be part of primary key is that there could be multiple values with different timestamps but same row key, family. and qualifier. The SQL result data model does not support such two dimension structure well. The best Phoenix can do in the SQL model is to return list of values in array, but then the cell timestamp need to be returned in another array with same length under different column name. You can imagine the mess and awkwardness it could be if going to that direction. It's much straightforward to make time stamp part of primary key, so the two dimension structure could be represented by multiple rows naturally in SQL result. Randy -- View this message in context: http://apache-phoenix-user-list.1124778.n5.nabble.com/phoenix-query-modtime-tp3702p3716.html Sent from the Apache Phoenix User List mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
