HBase row key design for monotonically increasing keys

Question

I\'ve an HBase table where I\'m writing the row keys like:

~1
~2
~3
...
~9
~10

Answer 1

Fixed length keys are really recommended if possible. Bytes.toBytes(Long value) can be used to get a byte array from a counter. It will sort well for positive longs less than Long.MAX_VALUE.