title: hbase: querying for specific value with dynamically created qualifier
body: <p>Hy,</p>
  
  <p>Hbase allows a column family to have different qualifiers in different rows. In my case a column family has the following specification</p>
  
  <pre><code>abc[cnt] # where cnt is an integer that can be any positive integer
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>what I want to achieve is to get all the data from a different column family, only if the value of the described qualifier (in a different column family) matches.</p>
  
  <p>for narrowing the Scan down I just add those two families I need for the query. but that is as far as I could get for now. </p>
  
  <p>I already achieved the same behaviour with a SingleColumnValueFilter, but then the qualifier was known in advance. but for this one the qualifier can be <em>abc1</em>, <em>abc2</em> ... there would be too many options, thus too many SingleColumnValueFilter's.</p>
  
  <p>Then I tried using the ValueFilter, but this filter only returns those columns that match the value, thus the wrong column family. </p>
  
  <p>Can you think of any way to achieve my goal, querying for a value within a dynamically created qualifier in a column family and returning the contents of the column family and another column family (as specified when creating the Scan)? preferably only querying once.</p>
  
  <p>Thanks in advance for any input.</p>
  
  <p><strong>UPDATE:</strong> (for clarification as discussed in the comments)</p>
  
  <p>in a more graphical way, a row may have the following:</p>
  
  <pre><code>colfam1:aaa
  colfam1:aab
  colfam1:aac
  colfam2:abc1
  colfam2:abc2
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>whereas I want to get all of the family colfam1 if <strong>any</strong> value of colfam2 has e.g. the value x, with regard to the fact that colfam2:abc[cnt] is dynamically created with cnt being any positive integer</p>