What is the difference between Column and Column family?

Dear,

Column

Column is one of HBase Table dimensions. A column name has the form "<family>:<label>" where <family> and <label> can be arbitrary byte arrays. A table enforces its set of <family>s (called "column families").

Column family

Column family is a predefined arbitrary set of columns and stored in HBase Schema. To create some column in family you should create family first. A column family regroups data of a same nature in HBase and has no constraint on the type. For each Row data in one Column family is physically stored at one server. Each Column family is attributes like: Compression, Timestamps, Block Cache and etc.

Hope this can help you.