Medium Object (MOB) storage support in Apache HBase

An HBase table becomes less efficient once any cell in the table exceeds 100 KB of data. Objects exceeding 100 KB are common when you store images and large documents, such as email attachments, in HBase tables. But, you can configure Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP) HBase to support tables with cells that have medium-size objects, also known as medium objects or more commonly as MOBs, to minimize the performance impact that objects over 100 KB can cause.

MOB support operates by storing a reference of the object data within the main table. The reference in the table points toward external HFiles that contain the actual data, which can be on disk or in HDFS.

To enable MOB storage support for a table column family, you can choose one of two methods. One way is to run the table create command or the table alter command with MOB options in the HBase shell. Alternatively, you can set MOB parameters in a Java API.