There are incompatibilities between HBase's AsyncTable and Bigtable's BigtableAsyncTable: the former accepts both ScanResultConsumer and AdvancedScanResultConsumer as argument to scan() whereas the latter one supports only ScanResultConsumer (and throws an exception when passed AdvancedScanResultConsumer).

It creates two problems:

• what to do when primary or secondary table doesn't support AdvancedScanResultConsumer as scan result consumer?
• how to implement flow control in view of nonblocking nature of scan result consumer's callbacks?

The solutions (in case the primary table is an HBase one) of the seconds problem proposed so far are as follows:

• to just pass the call through to primary table
• to make scan consumer's callbacks blocking (eg. by spinning up a thread and running a loop calling ResultScanner::next)
• to use AdvancedScanResultConsumer's flow control capabilities in coordination with our FlowController