HBase does not support any kind of joins, but it provides the single-indexing strategy on the row key. HBase schema design supports denormalization with nested entities. These nested entities are nothing but a column whose name is the unique identifier for the nested entity and whose value is the entire record mashed together. Since HBase allows dynamic column definition, there's no problem. Here's a great way to scale your joins. Additionally, with column families, large rows can be partitioned to small data chunks that can be read individually from a disk.

Schema or table design must be done at the initial phase, and we can add or remove columns on the fly, but we need to design our RowKey of table and column families at the initial schema design phase.

Some points that we might consider while designing a schema are as follows: