Data coordinates
In the logical data model, the version number is also part of the coordinates of a
piece of data. You can think of a relational database as storing a piece of data in a
table in a 2D coordinate system based first on row and second on column. By that
analogy, HBase stores a piece of data in a table based on a 4D coordinate system.
The coordinates used by HBase, in order, are rowkey, column family, column qualifier,
and version. Figure 2.4 illustrates these coordinates in our users table.
Considering the full set of coordinates as a unit, you can think of HBase as a keyvalue
store. With this abstraction of the logical data model in mind, you can consider
the coordinates as a key and the cell data as the value (see figure 2.5).
The HBase API is built such that you aren’t required to provide the entire coordinate</