title: Efficient way to delete multiple rows in HBase
body: <p>Is there an efficient way to delete multiple rows in HBase or does my use case smell like not suitable for HBase?</p>
  
  <p>There is a table say 'chart', which contains items that are in charts. Row keys are in the following format:
  <code>chart|date_reversed|ranked_attribute_value_reversed|content_id</code></p>
  
  <p>Sometimes I want to regenerate chart for a given date, so I want to delete all rows starting from 'chart|date_reversed_1' till 'chart|date_reversed_2'. Is there a better way than to issue a Delete for each row found by a Scan? All the rows to be deleted are going to be close to each other.</p>
  
  <p>I need to delete the rows, because I don't want one item (one content_id) to have multiple entries which it will have if its ranked_attribute_value had been changed (its change is the reason why chart needs to be regenerated).</p>
  
  <p>Being a HBase beginner, so perhaps I might be misusing rows for something that columns would be better -- if you have a design suggestions, cool! Or, maybe the charts are better generated in a file (e.g. no HBase for output)? I'm using MapReduce.</p>