Major Description
Currently, the tables in Phoenix have the same name as the underlying Hbase table. Separating logical and physical table name, ie. Having a Phoenix table point to an Hbase table with a different name have some advantages.
An example is this: Let's say we want to have a different storage/encoding scheme for an index. We can build the new index while the clients use the old index and once the index is rebuilt, we can momentarily start pointing to the new index table without much downtime or performance implications. For the client, they are using the same index with the same name, but the physical table is different. Today, in order to change the index like this, we have to drop it and re-create which is a downtime for the index and the data table full scans are used for queries impacting performance while the index creation goes on.