When you do not know the columns in an HBase table, you can search the rows in the table to identify all the columns and the occurrence percentage of the column. You can infer if the column name is valid based on the number of times the column occurs in the table. For example, if column name eName occurs rarely while column name empName occurs in a majority of rows, you can infer the column name as empName.

When you search and add columns, you can specify the maximum number of rows to search and the occurrence percentage value for a column. If you specify the maximum numbers of rows as 100 and the column occurrence percent as 90, all columns that appear at least 90 times in 100 rows appear in the results. You can select the columns in the results to add the columns to the data object.