A cell is the logical storage unit for the Apache HBase data model. Cells are stored individually, and empty cells are not stored at all, which makes HBase storage sparse. Values are stored as an array of bytes. A {row, column, version} tuple specifies a cell in a table. Cells store data as uninterpreted bytes. The timestampidentifies a version and must be unique for each cell.
Three coordinates define each cell. Coordinates for a cell are row key ➤ column key ➤ version. The column key includes the column family. At a fine-grained level, including the table, a cell’s coordinates are table ...
