The unit of storage in HBase consisting of the following fields:
1) row 2) column family 3) column qualifier 4) timestamp 5) type 6) MVCC version 7) value
Uniqueness is determined by the combination of row, column family, column qualifier, timestamp, and type.
The natural comparator will perform a bitwise comparison on row, column family, and column qualifier. Less intuitively, it will then treat the greater timestamp as the lesser value with the goal of sorting newer cells first.
This interface does not include methods that allocate new byte[]'s such as those used in client or debugging code. These should be placed in a sub-interface or the {@link CellUtil} class.
Cell implements Comparable
which is only meaningful when comparing to other keys in the same table. It uses CellComparator which does not work on the -ROOT- and .META. tables. In the future, we may consider adding a boolean isOnHeap() method and a getValueBuffer() method that can be used to pass a value directly from an off-heap ByteBuffer to the network without copying into an on-heap byte[]. Historic note: the original Cell implementation (KeyValue) requires that all fields be encoded as consecutive bytes in the same byte[], whereas this interface allows fields to reside in separate byte[]'s.
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