There is no direct method or property to disable tombstone marker. Major compacting the mob CF is the only way to go. There is a mob cleaner running on master that removes unreferenced mob files: The period of the cleaner chore can be configured by setting hbase.master.mob.cleaner.period to a positive integer number of seconds. It defaults to running daily. You should not need to tune it unless you have a very aggressive TTL or a very high rate of MOB updates with a correspondingly high rate of non-MOB compactions. So you can check and set the above parameter value and can manually trigger mob compaction by specifying the cf that includes mob data in hbase shell.   NOTE : MOBs are mostly for writing large cells that will rarely be updated or deleted but could have TTL configured for the cell or CF. ... View more