Managing compactions

An HBase table has the following physical storage structure:

Managing compactions

It consists of multiple regions. While a region may have several Stores, each holds a single column family. An edit first writes to the hosting region store's in-memory space, which is called MemStore. When the size of MemStore reaches a threshold, it is flushed to StoreFiles on HDFS.

As data increases, there may be many StoreFiles on HDFS, which is not good for its performance. Thus, HBase will automatically pick up a couple of the smaller StoreFiles and rewrite them into a bigger one. This process is called minor compaction. For certain situations, or when triggered ...

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