title: Hbase column family
body: <p>Hbase documentation says that avoid creating more than 2-3 column families because Hbase does not handle more than 2-3 column families very well. The reason for this is compaction and flushing and hence the IO. However, if all my columns are always populated (for every row) then I think this reasoning is not that important, so, considering that my access to columns is completely random (I want to access any combination of columns) - can I have one column family -one column configuration (effectively trying to make it pure columnar).</p>
  
  <p>There are many blogs/wikis explaining this but they all seem to contradict and add more confusion. I just don't seem to be able to digest the fact that Hbase prefers one column family, then what's the point of calling is a column store?</p>