title: HBase column families: how many?
body: <p>Probably there are a lot of similar questions but they dont' answer to my scenario (at least I'm not able to get the point).</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li><p>I have, lets say, a table in HBase with 4 column families. Main reason is that each column family has different VERSIONS attribute (very different).</p></li>
  <li><p>All column of all families are not storing big data (such for example fulltexts) but an average of 1KB (identifiers that are long, some short strings, integers and so on)</p></li>
  <li><p>I need to access data in several ways: scan and get by column family, get all cells of a given row by version (specific version or a  range), and last but not least: get the latest version of all columns of a given row.</p></li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>So, what are, in this scenario, the disadvantages of having 4 column families? Does reads are less efficient because they operate (in case the row is not in memory) on different store files?  </p>