The HBase delete request
When HBase receives a delete request for some data, it does not delete it immediately. The data that needs to be deleted is marked as a tombstone using the tombstone marker. It is a predicate deletion, which is a feature supported by LSM-trees on which HBase is based. This is done because HFile is immutable, and deletion of this is not available inside HFile on HDFS. One of the major compactions takes place when the marked record or data is discarded, and a new HFile is created without the marked data.
The reading and writing cycle
The following figure shows us how the overall reading and writing is done in HBase:
As we can ...
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