Phoenix 180

First revision for review.  There are some open points here.  Still no test case added to consume the stats.  Will do the performance test once the system is available with me.
I forgot to mention this before, but it's important that we always use the guide posts here to determine the set of work that will be done. We'll get rid of the hint for not splitting up work. I'm not super keen on falling back to using Bytes.split(), but not sure what a better alternative would be. I suppose when a table is initially created this will be the case for a while. We should at a minimum log a warning if we fallback to this. Any ideas here?