Columns in Apache HBase are grouped into column families. All column members of a column family have the same prefix. For example, the columns courses:history and courses:math are both members of the courses column family. The colon character (:) delimits the column family from the . The column family prefix must be composed of printable characters. The qualifying tail, the column family qualifier, can be made of any arbitrary bytes. Column families must be declared up front at schema definition time whereas columns do not need to be defined at schema time but can be conjured on the fly while the table is up an running.

Physically, all column family members are stored together on the filesystem. Because tunings and storage specifications are done at the column family level, it is advised that all column family members have the same general access pattern and size characteristics.