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Copyright © 2012 Apache Software Foundation. All Rights Reserved. Apache Hadoop, Hadoop, MapReduce, HDFS, Zookeeper, HBase, and the HBase project logo are trademarks of the Apache Software Foundation.
|Revision History
|Revision 0.94.27
This is the official reference guide of Apache HBase (TM), a distributed, versioned, column-oriented database built on top of Apache Hadoop and Apache ZooKeeper.
Table of Contents
List of Tables
This is the official reference guide for the HBase version it ships with. This document describes HBase version 0.94.27. Herein you will find either the definitive documentation on an HBase topic as of its standing when the referenced HBase version shipped, or it will point to the location in javadoc, JIRA or wiki where the pertinent information can be found.
This reference guide is a work in progress. Feel free to add content by adding a patch to an issue up in the HBase JIRA.
If this is your first foray into the wonderful world of Distributed Computing, then you are in for some interesting times. First off, distributed systems are hard; making a distributed system hum requires a disparate skillset that spans systems (hardware and software) and networking. Your cluster' operation can hiccup because of any of a myriad set of reasons from bugs in HBase itself through misconfigurations -- misconfiguration of HBase but also operating system misconfigurations -- through to hardware problems whether it be a bug in your network card drivers or an underprovisioned RAM bus (to mention two recent examples of hardware issues that manifested as "HBase is slow"). You will also need to do a recalibration if up to this your computing has been bound to a single box. Here is one good starting point: Fallacies of Distributed Computing.
Table of Contents
Section 1.2, "Quick Start" will get you up and running on a single-node instance of HBase using the local filesystem.
This guide describes setup of a standalone HBase instance that uses the local filesystem. It leads you through creating a table, inserting rows via the HBase shell, and then cleaning up and shutting down your standalone HBase instance. The below exercise should take no more than ten minutes (not including download time).
Before we proceed, make sure you are good on the below loopback prerequisite.
HBase expects the loopback IP address to be 127.0.0.1. Ubuntu and some other distributions, for example, will default to 127.0.1.1 and this will cause problems for you.
/etc/hosts should look something like this:
127.0.0.1 localhost 127.0.0.1 ubuntu.ubuntu-domain ubuntu
Choose a download site from this list of Apache Download
Mirrors. Click on the suggested top link. This will take you to a
mirror of HBase Releases. Click on the folder named
stable and then download the file that ends in
.tar.gz to your local filesystem; e.g.
Decompress and untar your download and then change into the unpacked directory.
$ tar xfz hbase-0.94.27.tar.gz $ cd hbase-0.94.27
At this point, you are ready to start HBase. But before starting
it, edit
conf/hbase-site.xml, the file you write
your site-specific configurations into. Set
hbase.rootdir, the directory HBase writes data to,
hbase.zookeeper.property.dataDir, the director
ZooKeeper writes its data too:
<?xml version="1.0"?> <?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="configuration.xsl"?> <configuration> <property> <name>hbase.rootdir</name> <value>file:///DIRECTORY/hbase</value> </property> <property> <name>hbase.zookeeper.property.dataDir</name> <value>/DIRECTORY/zookeeper</value> </property> </configuration>
DIRECTORY in the above with the
path to the directory you would have HBase and ZooKeeper write their data. By default,
hbase.rootdir is set to
and similarly so for the default ZooKeeper data location which means you'll lose all
your data whenever your server reboots unless you change it (Most operating systems clear
/tmp on restart).
Now start HBase:
$ ./bin/start-hbase.sh starting Master, logging to logs/hbase-user-master-example.org.out
You should now have a running standalone HBase instance. In
standalone mode, HBase runs all daemons in the the one JVM; i.e. both
the HBase and ZooKeeper daemons. HBase logs can be found in the
logs subdirectory. Check them out especially if
it seems HBase had trouble starting.
All of the above presumes a 1.6 version of Oracle
java is installed on your machine and
available on your path (See Section 2.1.1, "Java"); i.e. when you type
java, you see output that describes the
options the java program takes (HBase requires java 6). If this is not
the case, HBase will not start. Install java, edit
conf/hbase-env.sh, uncommenting the
JAVA_HOME line pointing it to your java install, then,
retry the steps above.
Connect to your running HBase via the shell.
$ ./bin/hbase shell HBase Shell; enter 'help<RETURN>' for list of supported commands. Type "exit<RETURN>" to leave the HBase Shell Version: 0.90.0, r1001068, Fri Sep 24 13:55:42 PDT 2010 hbase(main):001:0>
Type help and then <RETURN> to see a listing of shell commands and options. Browse at least the paragraphs at the end of the help emission for the gist of how variables and command arguments are entered into the HBase shell; in particular note how table names, rows, and columns, etc., must be quoted.
Create a table named
test with a single column family named
Verify its creation by listing all tables and then insert some
hbase(main):003:0> create 'test', 'cf' 0 row(s) in 1.2200 seconds hbase(main):003:0> list 'test' .. 1 row(s) in 0.0550 seconds hbase(main):004:0> put 'test', 'row1', 'cf:a', 'value1' 0 row(s) in 0.0560 seconds hbase(main):005:0> put 'test', 'row2', 'cf:b', 'value2' 0 row(s) in 0.0370 seconds hbase(main):006:0> put 'test', 'row3', 'cf:c', 'value3' 0 row(s) in 0.0450 seconds
Above we inserted 3 values, one at a time. The first insert is at
row1, column
cf:a with a value of
value1. Columns in HBase are comprised of a column family prefix --
cf in this example -- followed by a colon and then a
column qualifier suffix (
a in this case).
Verify the data insert by running a scan of the table as follows
hbase(main):007:0> scan 'test' ROW COLUMN+CELL row1 column=cf:a, timestamp=1288380727188, value=value1 row2 column=cf:b, timestamp=1288380738440, value=value2 row3 column=cf:c, timestamp=1288380747365, value=value3 3 row(s) in 0.0590 seconds
Get a single row
hbase(main):008:0> get 'test', 'row1' COLUMN CELL cf:a timestamp=1288380727188, value=value1 1 row(s) in 0.0400 seconds
Now, disable and drop your table. This will clean up all done above.
hbase(main):012:0> disable 'test' 0 row(s) in 1.0930 seconds hbase(main):013:0> drop 'test' 0 row(s) in 0.0770 seconds
Exit the shell by typing exit.
hbase(main):014:0> exit
Stop your hbase instance by running the stop script.
$ ./bin/stop-hbase.sh stopping hbase...............
The above described standalone setup is good for testing and experiments only. In the next chapter, Chapter 2, Apache HBase (TM) Configuration, we'll go into depth on the different HBase run modes, system requirements running HBase, and critical configurations setting up a distributed HBase deploy.
Table of Contents
This chapter is the Not-So-Quick start guide to Apache HBase (TM) configuration. It goes over system requirements, Hadoop setup, the different Apache HBase run modes, and the various configurations in HBase. Please read this chapter carefully. At a mimimum ensure that all Section 2.1, "Basic Prerequisites" have been satisfied. Failure to do so will cause you (and us) grief debugging strange errors and/or data loss.
Apache HBase uses the same configuration system as Apache Hadoop.
To configure a deploy, edit a file of environment variables
conf/hbase-env.sh -- this configuration
is used mostly by the launcher shell scripts getting the cluster
off the ground -- and then add configuration to an XML file to
do things like override HBase defaults, tell HBase what Filesystem to
use, and the location of the ZooKeeper ensemble
When running in distributed mode, after you make
an edit to an HBase configuration, make sure you copy the
content of the
conf directory to
all nodes of the cluster. HBase will not do this for you.
Use rsync.
This section lists required services and some required system configuration.
Just like Hadoop, HBase requires at least java 6 from Oracle.
ssh must be installed and sshd must be running to use Hadoop's scripts to manage remote Hadoop and HBase daemons. You must be able to ssh to all nodes, including your local node, using passwordless login (Google "ssh passwordless login"). If on mac osx, see the section, SSH: Setting up Remote Desktop and Enabling Self-Login on the hadoop wiki.
HBase uses the local hostname to self-report its IP address. Both forward and reverse DNS resolving must work in versions of HBase previous to 0.92.0 [2].
If your machine has multiple interfaces, HBase will use the interface that the primary hostname resolves to.
If this is insufficient, you can set
hbase.regionserver.dns.interface to indicate the
primary interface. This only works if your cluster configuration is
consistent and every host has the same network interface
Another alternative is setting
hbase.regionserver.dns.nameserver to choose a
different nameserver than the system wide default.
HBase expects the loopback IP address to be 127.0.0.1. See Section 126.96.36.199, "Loopback IP"
The clocks on cluster members should be in basic alignments. Some skew is tolerable but wild skew could generate odd behaviors. Run NTP on your cluster, or an equivalent.
If you are having problems querying data, or "weird" cluster operations, check system time!
Apache HBase is a database. It uses a lot of files all at the same time. The default ulimit -n -- i.e. user file limit -- of 1024 on most *nix systems is insufficient (On mac os x its 256). Any significant amount of loading will lead you to Section 188.8.131.52, "java.io.IOException...(Too many open files)". You may also notice errors such as...
2010-04-06 03:04:37,542 INFO org.apache.hadoop.hdfs.DFSClient: Exception increateBlockOutputStream java.io.EOFException 2010-04-06 03:04:37,542 INFO org.apache.hadoop.hdfs.DFSClient: Abandoning block blk_-6935524980745310745_1391901
Do yourself a favor and change the upper bound on the number of file descriptors. Set it to north of 10k. The math runs roughly as follows: per ColumnFamily there is at least one StoreFile and possibly up to 5 or 6 if the region is under load. Multiply the average number of StoreFiles per ColumnFamily times the number of regions per RegionServer. For example, assuming that a schema had 3 ColumnFamilies per region with an average of 3 StoreFiles per ColumnFamily, and there are 100 regions per RegionServer, the JVM will open 3 * 3 * 100 = 900 file descriptors (not counting open jar files, config files, etc.)
You should also up the hbase users'
nproc setting; under load, a low-nproc
setting could manifest as
To be clear, upping the file descriptors and nproc for the user who is running the HBase process is an operating system configuration, not an HBase configuration. Also, a common mistake is that administrators will up the file descriptors for a particular user but for whatever reason, HBase will be running as some one else. HBase prints in its logs as the first line the ulimit its seeing. Ensure its correct. [5]
If you are on Ubuntu you will need to make the following changes:
In the file
/etc/security/limits.conf add
a line like:
hadoop - nofile 32768
hadoop with whatever user is running
Hadoop and HBase. If you have separate users, you will need 2
entries, one for each user. In the same file set nproc hard and soft
limits. For example:
hadoop soft/hard nproc 32000
In the file
/etc/pam.d/common-session add
as the last line in the file:
session required pam_limits.so
Otherwise the changes in
/etc/security/limits.conf won't be
Don't forget to log out and back in again for the changes to take effect!
Apache HBase has been little tested running on Windows. Running a production install of HBase on top of Windows is not recommended.
If you are running HBase on Windows, you must install Cygwin to have a *nix-like environment for the shell scripts. The full details are explained in the Windows Installation guide. Also search our user mailing list to pick up latest fixes figured by Windows users.
Selecting a Hadoop version is critical for your HBase deployment. Below table shows some information about what versions of Hadoop are supported by various HBase versions. Based on the version of HBase, you should select the most appropriate version of Hadoop. We are not in the Hadoop distro selection business. You can use Hadoop distributions from Apache, or learn about vendor distributions of Hadoop at http://wiki.apache.org/hadoop/Distributions%20and%20Commercial%20Support
Table 2.1. Hadoop version support matrix
|S = supported and tested,
|X = not supported,
|NT = it should run, but not tested enough.
Because HBase depends on Hadoop, it bundles an instance of the Hadoop jar under its
lib directory. The bundled jar is ONLY for use in standalone mode. In distributed mode, it is critical that the version of Hadoop that is out on your cluster match what is under HBase. Replace the hadoop jar found in the HBase lib directory with the hadoop jar you are running on your cluster to avoid version mismatch issues. Make sure you replace the jar in HBase everywhere on your cluster. Hadoop version mismatch issues have various manifestations but often all looks like its hung up.
HBase 0.92 and 0.94 versions can work with Hadoop versions, 0.20.205, 0.22.x, 1.0.x, and 1.1.x. HBase-0.94 can additionally work with Hadoop-0.23.x and 2.x, but you may have to recompile the code using the specific maven profile (see top level pom.xml)
Apache HBase 0.96.0 requires Apache Hadoop 1.x at a minimum, and it can run equally well on hadoop-2.0. As of Apache HBase 0.96.x, Apache Hadoop 1.0.x at least is required. We will no longer run properly on older Hadoops such as 0.20.205 or branch-0.20-append. Do not move to Apache HBase 0.96.x if you cannot upgrade your Hadoop[6].
HBase will lose data unless it is running on an HDFS that has a durable
sync implementation. DO NOT use Hadoop 0.20.2, Hadoop 0.20.203.0, and Hadoop 0.20.204.0 which DO NOT have this attribute. Currently only Hadoop versions 0.20.205.x or any release in excess of this version -- this includes hadoop-1.0.0 -- have a working, durable sync
[7]. Sync has to be explicitly enabled by setting
dfs.support.append equal
to true on both the client side -- in
-- and on the serverside in
hdfs-site.xml (The sync
facility HBase needs is a subset of the append code path).
<property> <name>dfs.support.append</name> <value>true</value> </property>
You will have to restart your cluster after making this edit. Ignore the chicken-little
comment you'll find in the
hdfs-default.xml in the
description for the
dfs.support.append configuration.
Apache HBase will run on any Hadoop 0.20.x that incorporates Hadoop security features as long as you do as suggested above and replace the Hadoop jar that ships with HBase with the secure version. If you want to read more about how to setup Secure HBase, see Section 8.1, "Secure Client Access to Apache HBase".
An Hadoop HDFS datanode has an upper bound on the number of
files that it will serve at any one time. The upper bound parameter is
xcievers (yes, this is misspelled). Again,
before doing any loading, make sure you have configured Hadoop's
conf/hdfs-site.xml setting the
xceivers value to at least the following:
<property> <name>dfs.datanode.max.xcievers</name> <value>4096</value> </property>
Be sure to restart your HDFS after making the above configuration.
Not having this configuration in place makes for strange looking
failures. Eventually you'll see a complain in the datanode logs
complaining about the xcievers exceeded, but on the run up to this one
manifestation is complaint about missing blocks. For example:
10/12/08 20:10:31 INFO hdfs.DFSClient: Could not obtain block
blk_XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX_YYYYYYYY from any node:
java.io.IOException: No live nodes contain current block. Will get new
block locations from namenode and retry...
HBase has two run modes: Section 2.2.1, "Standalone HBase" and Section 2.2.2, "Distributed". Out of the box, HBase runs in
standalone mode. To set up a distributed deploy, you will need to
configure HBase by editing files in the HBase
Whatever your mode, you will need to edit
conf/hbase-env.sh to tell HBase which
java to use. In this file you set HBase environment
variables such as the heapsize and other options for the
JVM, the preferred location for log files,
etc. Set
JAVA_HOME to point at the root of your
java install.
This is the default mode. Standalone mode is what is described in the Section 1.2, "Quick Start" section. In standalone mode, HBase does not use HDFS -- it uses the local filesystem instead -- and it runs all HBase daemons and a local ZooKeeper all up in the same JVM. Zookeeper binds to a well known port so clients may talk to HBase.
Distributed mode can be subdivided into distributed but all daemons run on a single node -- a.k.a pseudo-distributed-- and fully-distributed where the daemons are spread across all nodes in the cluster [9].
Distributed modes require an instance of the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS). See the Hadoop requirements and instructions for how to set up a HDFS. Before proceeding, ensure you have an appropriate, working HDFS.
Below we describe the different distributed setups. Starting, verification and exploration of your install, whether a pseudo-distributed or fully-distributed configuration is described in a section that follows, Section 2.2.3, "Running and Confirming Your Installation". The same verification script applies to both deploy types.
A pseudo-distributed mode is simply a distributed mode run on a single host. Use this configuration testing and prototyping on HBase. Do not use this configuration for production nor for evaluating HBase performance.
First, setup your HDFS in pseudo-distributed mode.
Next, configure HBase. Below is an example
This is the file into
which you add local customizations and overrides for
??? and Section 18.104.22.168.3, "HDFS Client Configuration".
Note that the
hbase.rootdir property points to the
local HDFS instance.
Now skip to Section 2.2.3, "Running and Confirming Your Installation" for how to start and verify your pseudo-distributed install. [10]
Let HBase create the
directory. If you don't, you'll get warning saying HBase needs a
migration run because the directory is missing files expected by
HBase (it'll create them if you let it).
Below is a sample pseudo-distributed file for the node
<configuration> ... <property> <name>hbase.rootdir</name> <value>hdfs://h-24-30.sfo.stumble.net:8020/hbase</value> </property> <property> <name>hbase.cluster.distributed</name> <value>true</value> </property> <property> <name>hbase.zookeeper.quorum</name> <value>h-24-30.sfo.stumble.net</value> </property> ... </configuration>
To start up the initial HBase cluster...
% bin/start-hbase.sh
To start up an extra backup master(s) on the same server run...
% bin/local-master-backup.sh start 1
... the '1' means use ports 60001 & 60011, and this backup master's logfile will be at
To startup multiple backup masters run...
% bin/local-master-backup.sh start 2 3
You can start up to 9 backup masters (10 total).
To start up more regionservers...
% bin/local-regionservers.sh start 1
where '1' means use ports 60201 & 60301 and its logfile will be at
To add 4 more regionservers in addition to the one you just started by running...
% bin/local-regionservers.sh start 2 3 4 5
This supports up to 99 extra regionservers (100 total).
For running a fully-distributed operation on more than one
host, make the following configurations. In
hbase-site.xml, add the property
hbase.cluster.distributed and set it to
true and point the HBase
hbase.rootdir at the appropriate HDFS NameNode
and location in HDFS where you would like HBase to write data. For
example, if you namenode were running at namenode.example.org on
port 8020 and you wanted to home your HBase in HDFS at
/hbase, make the following
<configuration> ... <property> <name>hbase.rootdir</name> <value>hdfs://namenode.example.org:8020/hbase</value> <description>The directory shared by RegionServers. </description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.cluster.distributed</name> <value>true</value> <description>The mode the cluster will be in. Possible values are false: standalone and pseudo-distributed setups with managed Zookeeper true: fully-distributed with unmanaged Zookeeper Quorum (see hbase-env.sh) </description> </property> ... </configuration>
In addition, a fully-distributed mode requires that you
conf/regionservers. The
Section 22.214.171.124, "
regionservers" file
lists all hosts that you would have running
HRegionServers, one host per line (This
file in HBase is like the Hadoop
file). All servers listed in this file will be started and stopped
when HBase cluster start or stop is run.
See section Chapter 16, ZooKeeper for ZooKeeper setup for HBase.
Of note, if you have made HDFS client configuration on your Hadoop cluster -- i.e. configuration you want HDFS clients to use as opposed to server-side configurations -- HBase will not see this configuration unless you do one of the following:
Add a pointer to your
to the
HBASE_CLASSPATH environment variable
Add a copy of
hdfs-site.xml (or
hadoop-site.xml) or, better, symlinks,
${HBASE_HOME}/conf, or
if only a small set of HDFS client configurations, add
them to
An example of such an HDFS client configuration is
dfs.replication. If for example, you want to
run with a replication factor of 5, hbase will create files with
the default of 3 unless you do the above to make the configuration
available to HBase.
Make sure HDFS is running first. Start and stop the Hadoop HDFS
daemons by running
bin/start-hdfs.sh over in the
HADOOP_HOME directory. You can ensure it started
properly by testing the put and
get of files into the Hadoop filesystem. HBase does
not normally use the mapreduce daemons. These do not need to be
If you are managing your own ZooKeeper, start it and confirm its running else, HBase will start up ZooKeeper for you as part of its start process.
Start HBase with the following command:
bin/start-hbase.shRun the above from the
You should now have a running HBase instance. HBase logs can be
found in the
logs subdirectory. Check them out
especially if HBase had trouble starting.
HBase also puts up a UI listing vital attributes. By default its
deployed on the Master host at port 60010 (HBase RegionServers listen
on port 60020 by default and put up an informational http server at
60030). If the Master were running on a host named
master.example.org on the default port, to see the
Master's homepage you'd point your browser at
Once HBase has started, see the Section 1.2.3, "Shell Exercises" for how to create tables, add data, scan your insertions, and finally disable and drop your tables.
To stop HBase after exiting the HBase shell enter
$ ./bin/stop-hbase.sh stopping hbase...............
Shutdown can take a moment to complete. It can take longer if your cluster is comprised of many machines. If you are running a distributed operation, be sure to wait until HBase has shut down completely before stopping the Hadoop daemons.
Just as in Hadoop where you add site-specific HDFS configuration
to the
hdfs-site.xml file,
for HBase, site specific customizations go into
the file
For the list of configurable properties, see
below or view the raw
source file in the HBase source code at
Not all configuration options make it out to
hbase-default.xml. Configuration
that it is thought rare anyone would change can exist only
in code; the only way to turn up such configurations is
via a reading of the source code itself.
Currently, changes here will require a cluster restart for HBase to notice the change.<configuration> <property> <name>hbase.rootdir</name> <value>file:///tmp/hbase-${user.name}/hbase</value> <description>The directory shared by region servers and into which HBase persists. The URL should be 'fully-qualified' to include the filesystem scheme. For example, to specify the HDFS directory '/hbase' where the HDFS instance's namenode is running at namenode.example.org on port 9000, set this value to: hdfs://namenode.example.org:9000/hbase. By default HBase writes into /tmp. Change this configuration else all data will be lost on machine restart. </description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.master.port</name> <value>60000</value> <description>The port the HBase Master should bind to.</description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.cluster.distributed</name> <value>false</value> <description>The mode the cluster will be in. Possible values are false for standalone mode and true for distributed mode. If false, startup will run all HBase and ZooKeeper daemons together in the one JVM. </description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.tmp.dir</name> <value>${java.io.tmpdir}/hbase-${user.name}</value> <description>Temporary directory on the local filesystem. Change this setting to point to a location more permanent than '/tmp' (The '/tmp' directory is often cleared on machine restart). </description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.local.dir</name> <value>${hbase.tmp.dir}/local/</value> <description>Directory on the local filesystem to be used as a local storage. </description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.master.info.port</name> <value>60010</value> <description>The port for the HBase Master web UI. Set to -1 if you do not want a UI instance run. </description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.master.info.bindAddress</name> <value>0.0.0.0</value> <description>The bind address for the HBase Master web UI </description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.client.write.buffer</name> <value>2097152</value> <description>Default size of the HTable clien write buffer in bytes. A bigger buffer takes more memory -- on both the client and server side since server instantiates the passed write buffer to process it -- but a larger buffer size reduces the number of RPCs made. For an estimate of server-side memory-used, evaluate hbase.client.write.buffer * hbase.regionserver.handler.count </description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.regionserver.port</name> <value>60020</value> <description>The port the HBase RegionServer binds to. </description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.regionserver.info.port</name> <value>60030</value> <description>The port for the HBase RegionServer web UI Set to -1 if you do not want the RegionServer UI to run. </description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.regionserver.info.port.auto</name> <value>false</value> <description>Whether or not the Master or RegionServer UI should search for a port to bind to. Enables automatic port search if hbase.regionserver.info.port is already in use. Useful for testing, turned off by default. </description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.regionserver.info.bindAddress</name> <value>0.0.0.0</value> <description>The address for the HBase RegionServer web UI </description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.regionserver.class</name> <value>org.apache.hadoop.hbase.ipc.HRegionInterface</value> <description>The RegionServer interface to use. Used by the client opening proxy to remote region server. </description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.client.pause</name> <value>1000</value> <description>General client pause value. Used mostly as value to wait before running a retry of a failed get, region lookup, etc.</description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.client.retries.number</name> <value>14</value> <description>Maximum retries. Used as maximum for all retryable operations such as fetching of the root region from root region server, getting a cell's value, starting a row update, etc. Default: 14. </description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.bulkload.retries.number</name> <value>0</value> <description>Maximum retries. This is maximum number of iterations to atomic bulk loads are attempted in the face of splitting operations 0 means never give up. Default: 0. </description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.client.scanner.caching</name> <value>1</value> <description>Number of rows that will be fetched when calling next on a scanner if it is not served from (local, client) memory. Higher caching values will enable faster scanners but will eat up more memory and some calls of next may take longer and longer times when the cache is empty. Do not set this value such that the time between invocations is greater than the scanner timeout; i.e. hbase.regionserver.lease.period </description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.client.keyvalue.maxsize</name> <value>10485760</value> <description>Specifies the combined maximum allowed size of a KeyValue instance. This is to set an upper boundary for a single entry saved in a storage file. Since they cannot be split it helps avoiding that a region cannot be split any further because the data is too large. It seems wise to set this to a fraction of the maximum region size. Setting it to zero or less disables the check. </description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.regionserver.lease.period</name> <value>60000</value> <description>HRegion server lease period in milliseconds. Default is 60 seconds. Clients must report in within this period else they are considered dead.</description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.regionserver.handler.count</name> <value>10</value> <description>Count of RPC Listener instances spun up on RegionServers. Same property is used by the Master for count of master handlers. Default is 10. </description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.regionserver.msginterval</name> <value>3000</value> <description>Interval between messages from the RegionServer to Master in milliseconds. </description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.regionserver.optionallogflushinterval</name> <value>1000</value> <description>Sync the HLog to the HDFS after this interval if it has not accumulated enough entries to trigger a sync. Default 1 second. Units: milliseconds. </description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.regionserver.regionSplitLimit</name> <value>2147483647</value> <description>Limit for the number of regions after which no more region splitting should take place. This is not a hard limit for the number of regions but acts as a guideline for the regionserver to stop splitting after a certain limit. Default is set to MAX_INT; i.e. do not block splitting. </description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.regionserver.logroll.period</name> <value>3600000</value> <description>Period at which we will roll the commit log regardless of how many edits it has.</description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.regionserver.logroll.errors.tolerated</name> <value>2</value> <description>The number of consecutive WAL close errors we will allow before triggering a server abort. A setting of 0 will cause the region server to abort if closing the current WAL writer fails during log rolling. Even a small value (2 or 3) will allow a region server to ride over transient HDFS errors.</description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.regionserver.hlog.reader.impl</name> <value>org.apache.hadoop.hbase.regionserver.wal.SequenceFileLogReader</value> <description>The HLog file reader implementation.</description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.regionserver.hlog.writer.impl</name> <value>org.apache.hadoop.hbase.regionserver.wal.SequenceFileLogWriter</value> <description>The HLog file writer implementation.</description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.regionserver.separate.hlog.for.meta</name> <value>false</value> </property> <property> <name>hbase.regionserver.nbreservationblocks</name> <value>4</value> <description>The number of resevoir blocks of memory release on OOME so we can cleanup properly before server shutdown. </description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.zookeeper.dns.interface</name> <value>default</value> <description>The name of the Network Interface from which a ZooKeeper server should report its IP address. </description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.zookeeper.dns.nameserver</name> <value>default</value> <description>The host name or IP address of the name server (DNS) which a ZooKeeper server should use to determine the host name used by the master for communication and display purposes. </description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.regionserver.dns.interface</name> <value>default</value> <description>The name of the Network Interface from which a region server should report its IP address. </description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.regionserver.dns.nameserver</name> <value>default</value> <description>The host name or IP address of the name server (DNS) which a region server should use to determine the host name used by the master for communication and display purposes. </description> </property> <property> <name>fail.fast.expired.active.master</name> <value>false</value> <description>If abort immediately for the expired master without trying to recover its zk session.</description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.master.dns.interface</name> <value>default</value> <description>The name of the Network Interface from which a master should report its IP address. </description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.master.dns.nameserver</name> <value>default</value> <description>The host name or IP address of the name server (DNS) which a master should use to determine the host name used for communication and display purposes. </description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.balancer.period </name> <value>300000</value> <description>Period at which the region balancer runs in the Master. </description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.regions.slop</name> <value>0.2</value> <description>Rebalance if any regionserver has average + (average * slop) regions. Default is 20% slop. </description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.master.logcleaner.ttl</name> <value>600000</value> <description>Maximum time a HLog can stay in the .oldlogdir directory, after which it will be cleaned by a Master thread. </description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.master.logcleaner.plugins</name> <value>org.apache.hadoop.hbase.master.cleaner.TimeToLiveLogCleaner</value> <description>A comma-separated list of LogCleanerDelegate invoked by the LogsCleaner service. These WAL/HLog cleaners are called in order, so put the HLog cleaner that prunes the most HLog files in front. To implement your own LogCleanerDelegate, just put it in HBase's classpath and add the fully qualified class name here. Always add the above default log cleaners in the list. </description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.regionserver.global.memstore.upperLimit</name> <value>0.4</value> <description>Maximum size of all memstores in a region server before new updates are blocked and flushes are forced. Defaults to 40% of heap </description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.regionserver.global.memstore.lowerLimit</name> <value>0.35</value> <description>When memstores are being forced to flush to make room in memory, keep flushing until we hit this mark. Defaults to 35% of heap. This value equal to hbase.regionserver.global.memstore.upperLimit causes the minimum possible flushing to occur when updates are blocked due to memstore limiting. </description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.server.thread.wakefrequency</name> <value>10000</value> <description>Time to sleep in between searches for work (in milliseconds). Used as sleep interval by service threads such as log roller. </description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.server.versionfile.writeattempts</name> <value>3</value> <description> How many time to retry attempting to write a version file before just aborting. Each attempt is seperated by the hbase.server.thread.wakefrequency milliseconds. </description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.regionserver.optionalcacheflushinterval</name> <value>3600000</value> <description> Maximum amount of time an edit lives in memory before being automatically flushed. Default 1 hour. Set it to 0 to disable automatic flushing. </description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.hregion.memstore.flush.size</name> <value>134217728</value> <description> Memstore will be flushed to disk if size of the memstore exceeds this number of bytes. Value is checked by a thread that runs every hbase.server.thread.wakefrequency. </description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.hregion.preclose.flush.size</name> <value>5242880</value> <description> If the memstores in a region are this size or larger when we go to close, run a "pre-flush" to clear out memstores before we put up the region closed flag and take the region offline. On close, a flush is run under the close flag to empty memory. During this time the region is offline and we are not taking on any writes. If the memstore content is large, this flush could take a long time to complete. The preflush is meant to clean out the bulk of the memstore before putting up the close flag and taking the region offline so the flush that runs under the close flag has little to do. </description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.hregion.memstore.block.multiplier</name> <value>2</value> <description> Block updates if memstore has hbase.hregion.block.memstore time hbase.hregion.flush.size bytes. Useful preventing runaway memstore during spikes in update traffic. Without an upper-bound, memstore fills such that when it flushes the resultant flush files take a long time to compact or split, or worse, we OOME. </description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.hregion.memstore.mslab.enabled</name> <value>true</value> <description> Enables the MemStore-Local Allocation Buffer, a feature which works to prevent heap fragmentation under heavy write loads. This can reduce the frequency of stop-the-world GC pauses on large heaps. </description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.hregion.max.filesize</name> <value>10737418240</value> <description> Maximum HStoreFile size. If any one of a column families' HStoreFiles has grown to exceed this value, the hosting HRegion is split in two. Default: 10G. </description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.hstore.compactionThreshold</name> <value>3</value> <description> If more than this number of HStoreFiles in any one HStore (one HStoreFile is written per flush of memstore) then a compaction is run to rewrite all HStoreFiles files as one. Larger numbers put off compaction but when it runs, it takes longer to complete. </description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.hstore.blockingStoreFiles</name> <value>7</value> <description> If more than this number of StoreFiles in any one Store (one StoreFile is written per flush of MemStore) then updates are blocked for this HRegion until a compaction is completed, or until hbase.hstore.blockingWaitTime has been exceeded. </description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.hstore.blockingWaitTime</name> <value>90000</value> <description> The time an HRegion will block updates for after hitting the StoreFile limit defined by hbase.hstore.blockingStoreFiles. After this time has elapsed, the HRegion will stop blocking updates even if a compaction has not been completed. Default: 90 seconds. </description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.hstore.compaction.max</name> <value>10</value> <description>Max number of HStoreFiles to compact per 'minor' compaction. </description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.hregion.majorcompaction</name> <value>86400000</value> <description>The time (in miliseconds) between 'major' compactions of all HStoreFiles in a region. Default: 1 day. Set to 0 to disable automated major compactions. </description> </property> <property> <name>hfile.block.cache.size</name> <value>0.25</value> <description> Percentage of maximum heap (-Xmx setting) to allocate to block cache used by HFile/StoreFile. Default of 0.25 means allocate 25%. Set to 0 to disable but it's not recommended. </description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.hash.type</name> <value>murmur</value> <description>The hashing algorithm for use in HashFunction. Two values are supported now: murmur (MurmurHash) and jenkins (JenkinsHash). Used by bloom filters. </description> </property> <property> <name>hfile.block.index.cacheonwrite</name> <value>false</value> <description> This allows to put non-root multi-level index blocks into the block cache at the time the index is being written. </description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.regionserver.checksum.verify</name> <value>false</value> <description> Allow hbase to do checksums rather than using hdfs checksums. This is a backwards incompatible change. </description> </property> <property> <name>hfile.index.block.max.size</name> <value>131072</value> <description> When the size of a leaf-level, intermediate-level, or root-level index block in a multi-level block index grows to this size, the block is written out and a new block is started. </description> </property> <property> <name>hfile.format.version</name> <value>2</value> <description> The HFile format version to use for new files. Set this to 1 to test backwards-compatibility. The default value of this option should be consistent with FixedFileTrailer.MAX_VERSION. </description> </property> <property> <name>io.storefile.bloom.block.size</name> <value>131072</value> <description> The size in bytes of a single block ("chunk") of a compound Bloom filter. This size is approximate, because Bloom blocks can only be inserted at data block boundaries, and the number of keys per data block varies. </description> </property> <property> <name>io.storefile.bloom.cacheonwrite</name> <value>false</value> <description> Enables cache-on-write for inline blocks of a compound Bloom filter. </description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.rs.cacheblocksonwrite</name> <value>false</value> <description> Whether an HFile block should be added to the block cache when the block is finished. </description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.rpc.engine</name> <value>org.apache.hadoop.hbase.ipc.WritableRpcEngine</value> <description>Implementation of org.apache.hadoop.hbase.ipc.RpcEngine to be used for client / server RPC call marshalling. </description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.rpc.timeout</name> <value>60000</value> <description>This is for the RPC layer to define how long HBase client applications take for a remote call to time out. It uses pings to check connections but will eventually throw a TimeoutException.</description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.rpc.shortoperation.timeout</name> <value>10000</value> <description>This is another version of "hbase.rpc.timeout". For those RPC operation within cluster, we rely on this configuration to set a short timeout limitation for short operation. For example, short rpc timeout for region server's trying to report to active master can benefit quicker master failover process.</description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.regionserver.region.split.policy</name> <value>org.apache.hadoop.hbase.regionserver.IncreasingToUpperBoundRegionSplitPolicy</value> <description> A split policy determines when a region should be split. The various other split policies that are available currently are ConstantSizeRegionSplitPolicy, DisabledRegionSplitPolicy, DelimitedKeyPrefixRegionSplitPolicy, KeyPrefixRegionSplitPolicy etc. </description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.master.keytab.file</name> <value></value> <description>Full path to the kerberos keytab file to use for logging in the configured HMaster server principal. </description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.master.kerberos.principal</name> <value></value> <description>Ex. "firstname.lastname@example.com". The kerberos principal name that should be used to run the HMaster process. The principal name should be in the form: user/hostname@DOMAIN. If "_HOST" is used as the hostname portion, it will be replaced with the actual hostname of the running instance. </description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.regionserver.keytab.file</name> <value></value> <description>Full path to the kerberos keytab file to use for logging in the configured HRegionServer server principal. </description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.regionserver.kerberos.principal</name> <value></value> <description>Ex. "firstname.lastname@example.com". The kerberos principal name that should be used to run the HRegionServer process. The principal name should be in the form: user/hostname@DOMAIN. If "_HOST" is used as the hostname portion, it will be replaced with the actual hostname of the running instance. An entry for this principal must exist in the file specified in hbase.regionserver.keytab.file </description> </property> <property> <name>hadoop.policy.file</name> <value>hbase-policy.xml</value> <description>The policy configuration file used by RPC servers to make authorization decisions on client requests. Only used when HBase security is enabled. </description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.superuser</name> <value></value> <description>List of users or groups (comma-separated), who are allowed full privileges, regardless of stored ACLs, across the cluster. Only used when HBase security is enabled. </description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.auth.key.update.interval</name> <value>86400000</value> <description>The update interval for master key for authentication tokens in servers in milliseconds. Only used when HBase security is enabled. </description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.auth.token.max.lifetime</name> <value>604800000</value> <description>The maximum lifetime in milliseconds after which an authentication token expires. Only used when HBase security is enabled. </description> </property> <property> <name>zookeeper.session.timeout</name> <value>180000</value> <description>ZooKeeper session timeout. HBase passes this to the zk quorum as suggested maximum time for a session (This setting becomes zookeeper's 'maxSessionTimeout'). See http://hadoop.apache.org/zookeeper/docs/current/zookeeperProgrammers.html#ch_zkSessions "The client sends a requested timeout, the server responds with the timeout that it can give the client. " In milliseconds. </description> </property> <property> <name>zookeeper.znode.parent</name> <value>/hbase</value> <description>Root ZNode for HBase in ZooKeeper. All of HBase's ZooKeeper files that are configured with a relative path will go under this node. By default, all of HBase's ZooKeeper file path are configured with a relative path, so they will all go under this directory unless changed. </description> </property> <property> <name>zookeeper.znode.rootserver</name> <value>root-region-server</value> <description>Path to ZNode holding root region location. This is written by the master and read by clients and region servers. If a relative path is given, the parent folder will be ${zookeeper.znode.parent}. By default, this means the root location is stored at /hbase/root-region-server. </description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.ipc.client.fallback-to-simple-auth-allowed</name> <value>false</value> <description> When a client is configured to attempt a secure connection, but attempts to connect to an insecure server, that server may instruct the client to switch to SASL SIMPLE (unsecure) authentication. This setting controls whether or not the client will accept this instruction from the server. When false (the default), the client will not allow the fallback to SIMPLE authentication, and will abort the connection. This setting is only used by the secure RPC engine. </description> </property> <property> <name>zookeeper.znode.acl.parent</name> <value>acl</value> <description>Root ZNode for access control lists.</description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.coprocessor.region.classes</name> <value></value> <description>A comma-separated list of Coprocessors that are loaded by default on all tables. For any override coprocessor method, these classes will be called in order. After implementing your own Coprocessor, just put it in HBase's classpath and add the fully qualified class name here. A coprocessor can also be loaded on demand by setting HTableDescriptor. </description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.coprocessor.master.classes</name> <value></value> <description>A comma-separated list of org.apache.hadoop.hbase.coprocessor.MasterObserver coprocessors that are loaded by default on the active HMaster process. For any implemented coprocessor methods, the listed classes will be called in order. After implementing your own MasterObserver, just put it in HBase's classpath and add the fully qualified class name here. </description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.zookeeper.quorum</name> <value>localhost</value> <description>Comma separated list of servers in the ZooKeeper Quorum. For example, "host1.mydomain.com,host2.mydomain.com,host3.mydomain.com". By default this is set to localhost for local and pseudo-distributed modes of operation. For a fully-distributed setup, this should be set to a full list of ZooKeeper quorum servers. If HBASE_MANAGES_ZK is set in hbase-env.sh this is the list of servers which we will start/stop ZooKeeper on. </description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.zookeeper.peerport</name> <value>2888</value> <description>Port used by ZooKeeper peers to talk to each other. See http://hadoop.apache.org/zookeeper/docs/r3.1.1/zookeeperStarted.html#sc_RunningReplicatedZooKeeper for more information. </description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.zookeeper.leaderport</name> <value>3888</value> <description>Port used by ZooKeeper for leader election. See http://hadoop.apache.org/zookeeper/docs/r3.1.1/zookeeperStarted.html#sc_RunningReplicatedZooKeeper for more information. </description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.zookeeper.useMulti</name> <value>false</value> <description>Instructs HBase to make use of ZooKeeper's multi-update functionality. This allows certain ZooKeeper operations to complete more quickly and prevents some issues with rare ZooKeeper failure scenarios (see the release note of HBASE-6710 for an example). IMPORTANT: only set this to true if all ZooKeeper servers in the cluster are on version 3.4+ and will not be downgraded. ZooKeeper versions before 3.4 do not support multi-update and will not fail gracefully if multi-update is invoked (see ZOOKEEPER-1495). </description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.zookeeper.property.initLimit</name> <value>10</value> <description>Property from ZooKeeper's config zoo.cfg. The number of ticks that the initial synchronization phase can take. </description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.zookeeper.property.syncLimit</name> <value>5</value> <description>Property from ZooKeeper's config zoo.cfg. The number of ticks that can pass between sending a request and getting an acknowledgment. </description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.zookeeper.property.dataDir</name> <value>${hbase.tmp.dir}/zookeeper</value> <description>Property from ZooKeeper's config zoo.cfg. The directory where the snapshot is stored. </description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.zookeeper.property.clientPort</name> <value>2181</value> <description>Property from ZooKeeper's config zoo.cfg. The port at which the clients will connect. </description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.zookeeper.property.maxClientCnxns</name> <value>300</value> <description>Property from ZooKeeper's config zoo.cfg. Limit on number of concurrent connections (at the socket level) that a single client, identified by IP address, may make to a single member of the ZooKeeper ensemble. Set high to avoid zk connection issues running standalone and pseudo-distributed. </description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.rest.port</name> <value>8080</value> <description>The port for the HBase REST server.</description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.rest.readonly</name> <value>false</value> <description> Defines the mode the REST server will be started in. Possible values are: false: All HTTP methods are permitted - GET/PUT/POST/DELETE. true: Only the GET method is permitted. </description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.defaults.for.version</name> <value>@@@VERSION@@@</value> <description> This defaults file was compiled for version @@@VERSION@@@. This variable is used to make sure that a user doesn't have an old version of hbase-default.xml on the classpath. </description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.defaults.for.version.skip</name> <value>false</value> <description> Set to true to skip the 'hbase.defaults.for.version' check. Setting this to true can be useful in contexts other than the other side of a maven generation; i.e. running in an ide. You'll want to set this boolean to true to avoid seeing the RuntimException complaint: "hbase-default.xml file seems to be for and old version of HBase (@@@VERSION@@@), this version is X.X.X-SNAPSHOT" </description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.coprocessor.abortonerror</name> <value>false</value> <description> Set to true to cause the hosting server (master or regionserver) to abort if a coprocessor throws a Throwable object that is not IOException or a subclass of IOException. Setting it to true might be useful in development environments where one wants to terminate the server as soon as possible to simplify coprocessor failure analysis. </description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.online.schema.update.enable</name> <value>false</value> <description> Set true to enable online schema changes. This is an experimental feature. There are known issues modifying table schemas at the same time a region split is happening so your table needs to be quiescent or else you have to be running with splits disabled. </description> </property> <property> <name>dfs.support.append</name> <value>true</value> <description>Does HDFS allow appends to files? This is an hdfs config. set in here so the hdfs client will do append support. You must ensure that this config. is true serverside too when running hbase (You will have to restart your cluster after setting it). </description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.regionserver.thrift.framed</name> <value>false</value> <description>Use Thrift TFramedTransport on the server side. This is the recommended transport for thrift servers and requires a similar setting on the client side. Setting this to false will select the default transport, vulnerable to DoS when malformed requests are issued due to THRIFT-601. </description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.regionserver.thrift.framed.max_frame_size_in_mb</name> <value>2</value> <description>Default frame size when using framed transport</description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.regionserver.thrift.compact</name> <value>false</value> <description>Use Thrift TCompactProtocol binary serialization protocol.</description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.thrift.minWorkerThreads</name> <value>16</value> <description> The "core size" of the thread pool. New threads are created on every connection until this many threads are created. </description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.thrift.maxWorkerThreads</name> <value>1000</value> <description> The maximum size of the thread pool. When the pending request queue overflows, new threads are created until their number reaches this number. After that, the server starts dropping connections. </description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.thrift.maxQueuedRequests</name> <value>1000</value> <description> The maximum number of pending Thrift connections waiting in the queue. If there are no idle threads in the pool, the server queues requests. Only when the queue overflows, new threads are added, up to hbase.thrift.maxQueuedRequests threads. </description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.thrift.htablepool.size.max</name> <value>1000</value> <description>The upper bound for the table pool used in the Thrift gateways server. Since this is per table name, we assume a single table and so with 1000 default worker threads max this is set to a matching number. For other workloads this number can be adjusted as needed. </description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.offheapcache.percentage</name> <value>0</value> <description> The amount of off heap space to be allocated towards the experimental off heap cache. If you desire the cache to be disabled, simply set this value to 0. </description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.data.umask.enable</name> <value>false</value> <description>Enable, if true, that file permissions should be assigned to the files written by the regionserver </description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.data.umask</name> <value>000</value> <description>File permissions that should be used to write data files when hbase.data.umask.enable is true </description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.metrics.showTableName</name> <value>true</value> <description>Whether to include the prefix "tbl.tablename" in per-column family metrics. If true, for each metric M, per-cf metrics will be reported for tbl.T.cf.CF.M, if false, per-cf metrics will be aggregated by column-family across tables, and reported for cf.CF.M. In both cases, the aggregated metric M across tables and cfs will be reported. </description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.table.archive.directory</name> <value>.archive</value> <description>Per-table directory name under which to backup files for a table. Files are moved to the same directories as they would be under the table directory, but instead are just one level lower (under table/.archive/... rather than table/...). Currently only applies to HFiles.</description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.master.hfilecleaner.plugins</name> <value>org.apache.hadoop.hbase.master.cleaner.TimeToLiveHFileCleaner</value> <description>A comma-separated list of HFileCleanerDelegate invoked by the HFileCleaner service. These HFiles cleaners are called in order, so put the cleaner that prunes the most files in front. To implement your own HFileCleanerDelegate, just put it in HBase's classpath and add the fully qualified class name here. Always add the above default log cleaners in the list as they will be overwritten in hbase-site.xml. </description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.rest.threads.max</name> <value>100</value> <description> The maximum number of threads of the REST server thread pool. Threads in the pool are reused to process REST requests. This controls the maximum number of requests processed concurrently. It may help to control the memory used by the REST server to avoid OOM issues. If the thread pool is full, incoming requests will be queued up and wait for some free threads. The default is 100. </description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.rest.threads.min</name> <value>2</value> <description> The minimum number of threads of the REST server thread pool. The thread pool always has at least these number of threads so the REST server is ready to serve incoming requests. The default is 2. </description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.lease.recovery.timeout</name> <value>900000</value> <description> How long we wait on dfs lease recovery in total before giving up. </description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.lease.recovery.dfs.timeout</name> <value>61000</value> <description> How long between dfs recover lease invocations. Should be just larger than how long it takes the namenode to timeout trying to reach a datanode; usually dfs.socket.timeout. If HBase asked hdfs its cluster configs, we would not need this config. See the end of HBASE-8389 for more. </description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.dynamic.jars.dir</name> <value>${hbase.rootdir}/.lib</value> <description> The directory from which the custom filter/co-processor jars can be loaded dynamically by the region server without the need to restart. However, an already loaded filter/co-processor class would not be un-loaded. See HBASE-1936 for more details. </description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.security.authentication</name> <value>simple</value> <description> Controls whether or not secure authentication is enabled for HBase. Possible values are 'simple' (no authentication), and 'kerberos'. </description> </property> </configuration>
Set HBase environment variables in this file.
Examples include options to pass the JVM on start of
an HBase daemon such as heap size and garbarge collector configs.
You can also set configurations for HBase configuration, log directories,
niceness, ssh options, where to locate process pid files,
etc. Open the file at
conf/hbase-env.sh and peruse its content.
Each option is fairly well documented. Add your own environment
variables here if you want them read by HBase daemons on startup.
Changes here will require a cluster restart for HBase to notice the change.
Edit this file to change rate at which HBase files are rolled and to change the level at which HBase logs messages.
Changes here will require a cluster restart for HBase to notice the change though log levels can be changed for particular daemons via the HBase UI.
Since the HBase Master may move around, clients bootstrap by looking to ZooKeeper for
current critical locations. ZooKeeper is where all these values are kept. Thus clients
require the location of the ZooKeeper ensemble information before they can do anything else.
Usually this the ensemble location is kept out in the
hbase-site.xml and
is picked up by the client from the
If you are configuring an IDE to run a HBase client, you should
include the
conf/ directory on your classpath so
hbase-site.xml settings can be found (or
src/test/resources to pick up the hbase-site.xml
used by tests).
Minimally, a client of HBase needs several libraries in its
CLASSPATH when connecting to a cluster, including:
commons-configuration (commons-configuration-1.6.jar) commons-lang (commons-lang-2.5.jar) commons-logging (commons-logging-1.1.1.jar) hadoop-core (hadoop-core-1.0.0.jar) hbase (hbase-0.92.0.jar) log4j (log4j-1.2.16.jar) slf4j-api (slf4j-api-1.5.8.jar) slf4j-log4j (slf4j-log4j12-1.5.8.jar) zookeeper (zookeeper-3.4.2.jar)
An example basic
hbase-site.xml for client only
might look as follows:
<?xml version="1.0"?> <?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="configuration.xsl"?> <configuration> <property> <name>hbase.zookeeper.quorum</name> <value>example1,example2,example3</value> <description>The directory shared by region servers. </description> </property> </configuration>
The configuration used by a Java client is kept
in an HBaseConfiguration instance.
The factory method on HBaseConfiguration,
on invocation, will read in the content of the first
hbase-site.xml found on
the client's
CLASSPATH, if one is present
(Invocation will also factor in any
hbase-default.xml found;
an hbase-default.xml ships inside the
It is also possible to specify configuration directly without having to read from a
hbase-site.xml. For example, to set the ZooKeeper
ensemble for the cluster programmatically do as follows:
Configuration config = HBaseConfiguration.create(); config.set("hbase.zookeeper.quorum", "localhost"); // Here we are running zookeeper locally
If multiple ZooKeeper instances make up your ZooKeeper ensemble,
they may be specified in a comma-separated list (just as in the
hbase-site.xml file).
This populated
Configuration instance can then be passed to an
and so on.
Here is an example basic configuration for a distributed ten
node cluster. The nodes are named
example1, etc., through node
example9 in this example. The HBase Master and the
HDFS namenode are running on the node
RegionServers run on nodes
example9. A 3-node
ZooKeeper ensemble runs on
example2, and
example3 on the
default ports. ZooKeeper data is persisted to the directory
/export/zookeeper. Below we show what the main
configuration files --
regionservers, and
hbase-env.sh -- found in the HBase
conf directory might look like.
<?xml version="1.0"?> <?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="configuration.xsl"?> <configuration> <property> <name>hbase.zookeeper.quorum</name> <value>example1,example2,example3</value> <description>The directory shared by RegionServers. </description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.zookeeper.property.dataDir</name> <value>/export/zookeeper</value> <description>Property from ZooKeeper's config zoo.cfg. The directory where the snapshot is stored. </description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.rootdir</name> <value>hdfs://example0:8020/hbase</value> <description>The directory shared by RegionServers. </description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.cluster.distributed</name> <value>true</value> <description>The mode the cluster will be in. Possible values are false: standalone and pseudo-distributed setups with managed Zookeeper true: fully-distributed with unmanaged Zookeeper Quorum (see hbase-env.sh) </description> </property> </configuration>
In this file you list the nodes that will run RegionServers.
In our case we run RegionServers on all but the head node
example1 which is carrying the HBase Master and
the HDFS namenode
example1 example3 example4 example5 example6 example7 example8 example9
Below we use a diff to show the differences
from default in the
hbase-env.sh file. Here we
are setting the HBase heap to be 4G instead of the default
$ git diff hbase-env.sh diff --git a/conf/hbase-env.sh b/conf/hbase-env.sh index e70ebc6..96f8c27 100644 --- a/conf/hbase-env.sh +++ b/conf/hbase-env.sh @@ -31,7 +31,7 @@ export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib//jvm/java-6-sun/ # export HBASE_CLASSPATH= # The maximum amount of heap to use, in MB. Default is 1000. -# export HBASE_HEAPSIZE=1000 +export HBASE_HEAPSIZE=4096 # Extra Java runtime options. # Below are what we set by default. May only work with SUN JVM.
Use rsync to copy the content of the
conf directory to all nodes of the
Below we list what the important Configurations. We've divided this section into required configuration and worth-a-look recommended configs.
Review the Section 2.1.2, "Operating System" and Section 2.1.3, "Hadoop" sections.
If a cluster with a lot of regions, it is possible if an eager beaver
regionserver checks in soon after master start while all the rest in the
cluster are laggardly, this first server to checkin will be assigned all
regions. If lots of regions, this first server could buckle under the
load. To prevent the above scenario happening up the
hbase.master.wait.on.regionservers.mintostart from its
default value of 1. See
HBASE-6389 Modify the conditions to ensure that Master waits for sufficient number of Region Servers before starting region assignments
for more detail.
The default timeout is three minutes (specified in milliseconds). This means that if a server crashes, it will be three minutes before the Master notices the crash and starts recovery. You might like to tune the timeout down to a minute or even less so the Master notices failures the sooner. Before changing this value, be sure you have your JVM garbage collection configuration under control otherwise, a long garbage collection that lasts beyond the ZooKeeper session timeout will take out your RegionServer (You might be fine with this -- you probably want recovery to start on the server if a RegionServer has been in GC for a long period of time).
To change this configuration, edit
copy the changed file around the cluster and restart.
We set this value high to save our having to field noob questions up on the mailing lists asking why a RegionServer went down during a massive import. The usual cause is that their JVM is untuned and they are running into long GC pauses. Our thinking is that while users are getting familiar with HBase, we'd save them having to know all of its intricacies. Later when they've built some confidence, then they can play with configuration such as this.
This is the "...number of volumes that are allowed to fail before a datanode stops offering service. By default
any volume failure will cause a datanode to shutdown" from the
description. If you have > three or four disks, you might want to set this to 1 or if you have many disks,
two or more.
This setting defines the number of threads that are kept open to answer incoming requests to user tables. The default of 10 is rather low in order to prevent users from killing their region servers when using large write buffers with a high number of concurrent clients. The rule of thumb is to keep this number low when the payload per request approaches the MB (big puts, scans using a large cache) and high when the payload is small (gets, small puts, ICVs, deletes).
It is safe to set that number to the maximum number of incoming clients if their payload is small, the typical example being a cluster that serves a website since puts aren't typically buffered and most of the operations are gets.
The reason why it is dangerous to keep this setting high is that the aggregate size of all the puts that are currently happening in a region server may impose too much pressure on its memory, or even trigger an OutOfMemoryError. A region server running on low memory will trigger its JVM's garbage collector to run more frequently up to a point where GC pauses become noticeable (the reason being that all the memory used to keep all the requests' payloads cannot be trashed, no matter how hard the garbage collector tries). After some time, the overall cluster throughput is affected since every request that hits that region server will take longer, which exacerbates the problem even more.
You can get a sense of whether you have too little or too many handlers by Section 18.104.22.168, "Enabling RPC-level logging" on an individual RegionServer then tailing its logs (Queued requests consume memory).
HBase ships with a reasonable, conservative configuration that will work on nearly all machine types that people might want to test with. If you have larger machines -- HBase has 8G and larger heap -- you might the following configuration options helpful. TODO.
You should consider enabling ColumnFamily compression. There are several options that are near-frictionless and in most all cases boost performance by reducing the size of StoreFiles and thus reducing I/O.
See Appendix C, Compression In HBase for more information.
Consider going to larger regions to cut down on the total number of regions on your cluster. Generally less Regions to manage makes for a smoother running cluster (You can always later manually split the big Regions should one prove hot and you want to spread the request load over the cluster). A lower number of regions is preferred, generally in the range of 20 to low-hundreds per RegionServer. Adjust the regionsize as appropriate to achieve this number.
For the 0.90.x codebase, the upper-bound of regionsize is about 4Gb, with a default of 256Mb. For 0.92.x codebase, due to the HFile v2 change much larger regionsizes can be supported (e.g., 20Gb).
You may need to experiment with this setting based on your hardware configuration and application needs.
hbase.hregion.max.filesize in your
RegionSize can also be set on a per-table basis via
Typically you want to keep your region count low on HBase for numerous reasons.
Usually right around 100 regions per RegionServer has yielded the best results.
Here are some of the reasons below for keeping region count low:
MSLAB requires 2mb per memstore (that's 2mb per family per region).
1000 regions that have 2 families each is 3.9GB of heap used, and it's not even storing data yet. NB: the 2MB value is configurable.
If you fill all the regions at somewhat the same rate, the global memory usage makes it that it forces tiny
flushes when you have too many regions which in turn generates compactions.
Rewriting the same data tens of times is the last thing you want.
An example is filling 1000 regions (with one family) equally and let's consider a lower bound for global memstore
usage of 5GB (the region server would have a big heap).
Once it reaches 5GB it will force flush the biggest region,
at that point they should almost all have about 5MB of data so
it would flush that amount. 5MB inserted later, it would flush another
region that will now have a bit over 5MB of data, and so on.
A basic formula for the amount of regions to have per region server would
look like this:
Heap * upper global memstore limit = amount of heap devoted to memstore
then the amount of heap devoted to memstore / (Number of regions per RS * CFs).
This will give you the rough memstore size if everything is being written to.
A more accurate formula is
Heap * upper global memstore limit = amount of heap devoted to memstore then the
amount of heap devoted to memstore / (Number of actively written regions per RS * CFs).
This can allot you a higher region count from the write perspective if you know how many
regions you will be writing to at one time.
The master as is is allergic to tons of regions, and will
take a lot of time assigning them and moving them around in batches.
The reason is that it's heavy on ZK usage, and it's not very async
at the moment (could really be improved -- and has been imporoved a bunch
in 0.96 hbase).
In older versions of HBase (pre-v2 hfile, 0.90 and previous), tons of regions
on a few RS can cause the store file index to rise raising heap usage and can
create memory pressure or OOME on the RSs
MSLAB requires 2mb per memstore (that's 2mb per family per region). 1000 regions that have 2 families each is 3.9GB of heap used, and it's not even storing data yet. NB: the 2MB value is configurable.</listitem> <listitem>
If you fill all the regions at somewhat the same rate, the global memory usage makes it that it forces tiny flushes when you have too many regions which in turn generates compactions. Rewriting the same data tens of times is the last thing you want. An example is filling 1000 regions (with one family) equally and let's consider a lower bound for global memstore usage of 5GB (the region server would have a big heap). Once it reaches 5GB it will force flush the biggest region, at that point they should almost all have about 5MB of data so it would flush that amount. 5MB inserted later, it would flush another region that will now have a bit over 5MB of data, and so on. A basic formula for the amount of regions to have per region server would look like this: Heap * upper global memstore limit = amount of heap devoted to memstore then the amount of heap devoted to memstore / (Number of regions per RS * CFs). This will give you the rough memstore size if everything is being written to. A more accurate formula is Heap * upper global memstore limit = amount of heap devoted to memstore then the amount of heap devoted to memstore / (Number of actively written regions per RS * CFs). This can allot you a higher region count from the write perspective if you know how many regions you will be writing to at one time.</listitem> <listitem>
The master as is is allergic to tons of regions, and will take a lot of time assigning them and moving them around in batches. The reason is that it's heavy on ZK usage, and it's not very async at the moment (could really be improved -- and has been imporoved a bunch in 0.96 hbase).</listitem> <listitem>
In older versions of HBase (pre-v2 hfile, 0.90 and previous), tons of regions on a few RS can cause the store file index to rise raising heap usage and can create memory pressure or OOME on the RSs</listitem> </unorderedlist>
Another issue is the effect of the number of regions on mapreduce jobs. Keeping 5 regions per RS would be too low for a job, whereas 1000 will generate too many maps.
Rather than let HBase auto-split your Regions, manage the splitting manually
With growing amounts of data, splits will continually be needed. Since
you always know exactly what regions you have, long-term debugging and
profiling is much easier with manual splits. It is hard to trace the logs to
understand region level problems if it keeps splitting and getting renamed.
Data offlining bugs + unknown number of split regions == oh crap! If an
HLog or
was mistakenly unprocessed by HBase due to a weird bug and
you notice it a day or so later, you can be assured that the regions
specified in these files are the same as the current regions and you have
less headaches trying to restore/replay your data.
You can finely tune your compaction algorithm. With roughly uniform data
growth, it's easy to cause split / compaction storms as the regions all
roughly hit the same data size at the same time. With manual splits, you can
let staggered, time-based major compactions spread out your network IO load.
How do I turn off automatic splitting? Automatic splitting is determined by the configuration value
hbase.hregion.max.filesize. It is not recommended that you set this
Long.MAX_VALUE in case you forget about manual splits. A suggested setting
is 100GB, which would result in > 1hr major compactions if reached.
What's the optimal number of pre-split regions to create?
Mileage will vary depending upon your application.
You could start low with 10 pre-split regions / server and watch as data grows
over time. It's better to err on the side of too little regions and rolling split later.
A more complicated answer is that this depends upon the largest storefile
in your region. With a growing data size, this will get larger over time. You
want the largest region to be just big enough that the
Store compact
selection algorithm only compacts it due to a timed major. If you don't, your
cluster can be prone to compaction storms as the algorithm decides to run
major compactions on a large series of regions all at once. Note that
compaction storms are due to the uniform data growth, not the manual split
If you pre-split your regions too thin, you can increase the major compaction
interval by configuring
HConstants.MAJOR_COMPACTION_PERIOD. If your data size
grows too large, use the (post-0.90.0 HBase)
script to perform a network IO safe rolling split
of all regions.
A common administrative technique is to manage major compactions manually, rather than letting
HBase do it. By default,
HConstants.MAJOR_COMPACTION_PERIOD is one day and major compactions
may kick in when you least desire it - especially on a busy system. To turn off automatic major compactions set
the value to
It is important to stress that major compactions are absolutely necessary for StoreFile cleanup, the only variant is when they occur. They can be administered through the HBase shell, or via HBaseAdmin.
For more information about compactions and the compaction file selection process, see Section 188.8.131.52, "Compaction"
Speculative Execution of MapReduce tasks is on by default, and for HBase clusters it is generally advised to turn off
Speculative Execution at a system-level unless you need it for a specific case, where it can be configured per-job.
Set the properties
mapred.map.tasks.speculative.execution and
mapred.reduce.tasks.speculative.execution to false.
The balancer is a periodic operation which is run on the master to redistribute regions on the cluster. It is configured via
hbase.balancer.period and defaults to 300000 (5 minutes).
See Section 18.104.22.168, "LoadBalancer" for more information on the LoadBalancer.
Do not turn off block cache (You'd do it by setting
hbase.block.cache.size to zero).
Currently we do not do well if you do this because the regionserver will spend all its time loading hfile
indices over and over again. If your working set it such that block cache does you no good, at least
size the block cache such that hfile indices will stay up in the cache (you can get a rough idea
on the size you need by surveying regionserver UIs; you'll see index block size accounted near the
top of the webpage).
If a big 40ms or so occasional delay is seen in operations against HBase, try the Nagles' setting. For example, see the user mailing list thread, Inconsistent scan performance with caching set to 1 and the issue cited therein where setting notcpdelay improved scan speeds. You might also see the graphs on the tail of HBASE-7008 Set scanner caching to a better default where our Lars Hofhansl tries various data sizes w/ Nagle's on and off measuring the effect.
[1] Be careful editing XML. Make sure you close all elements. Run your file through xmllint or similar to ensure well-formedness of your document after an edit session.
[2] The hadoop-dns-checker tool can be used to verify DNS is working correctly on the cluster. The project README file provides detailed instructions on usage.
[3] See Jack Levin's major hdfs issues note up on the user list.
[4] The requirement that a database requires upping of system limits is not peculiar to Apache HBase. See for example the section Setting Shell Limits for the Oracle User in Short Guide to install Oracle 10 on Linux.
[5] A useful read setting config on you hadoop cluster is Aaron Kimballs' Configuration Parameters: What can you just ignore?
[7] The Cloudera blog post An update on Apache Hadoop 1.0 by Charles Zedlweski has a nice exposition on how all the Hadoop versions relate. Its worth checking out if you are having trouble making sense of the Hadoop version morass.
[8] See Hadoop HDFS: Deceived by Xciever for an informative rant on xceivering.
[9] The pseudo-distributed vs fully-distributed nomenclature comes from Hadoop.
[10] See Section 184.108.40.206.2, "Pseudo-distributed Extras" for notes on how to start extra Masters and RegionServers when running pseudo-distributed.
[11] What follows is taken from the javadoc at the head of
org.apache.hadoop.hbase.util.RegionSplitter tool
added to HBase post-0.90.0 release.
Table of Contents
You cannot skip major verisons upgrading. If you are upgrading from version 0.20.x to 0.92.x, you must first go from 0.20.x to 0.90.x and then go from 0.90.x to 0.92.x.
Review Chapter 2, Apache HBase (TM) Configuration, in particular the section on Hadoop version.
You will have to stop your old 0.94 cluster completely to upgrade. If you are replicating between clusters, both clusters will have to go down to upgrade. Make sure it is a clean shutdown so there are no WAL files laying around (TODO: Can 0.96 read 0.94 WAL files?). Make sure zookeeper is cleared of state. All clients must be upgraded to 0.96 too.
The API has changed in a few areas; in particular how you use coprocessors (TODO: MapReduce too?)
TODO: Write about 3.4 zk ensemble and multi support
0.92 and 0.94 are interface compatible. You can do a rolling upgrade between these versions.
You will find that 0.92.0 runs a little differently to 0.90.x releases. Here are a few things to watch out for upgrading from 0.90.x to 0.92.0.
If you've not patience, here are the important things to know upgrading.
To move to 0.92.0, all you need to do is shutdown your cluster, replace your hbase 0.90.x with hbase 0.92.0 binaries (be sure you clear out all 0.90.x instances) and restart (You cannot do a rolling restart from 0.90.x to 0.92.x -- you must restart).
On startup, the
.META. table content is rewritten removing the table schema from the
info:regioninfo column.
Also, any flushes done post first startup will write out data in the new 0.92.0 file format, HFile V2.
This means you cannot go back to 0.90.x once you've started HBase 0.92.0 over your HBase data directory.
In 0.92.0, the hbase.hregion.memstore.mslab.enabled flag is set to true
(See Section 126.96.36.199, "Long GC pauses"). In 0.90.x it was
false. When it is enabled, memstores will step allocate memory in MSLAB 2MB chunks even if the
memstore has zero or just a few small elements. This is fine usually but if you had lots of regions per regionserver in a 0.90.x cluster (and MSLAB was off),
you may find yourself OOME'ing on upgrade because the thousands of regions * number of column families * 2MB MSLAB (at a minimum)
puts your heap over the top. Set
hbase.hregion.memstore.mslab.enabled to
false or set the MSLAB size down from 2MB by setting
hbase.hregion.memstore.mslab.chunksize to something less.
Previous, WAL logs on crash were split by the Master alone. In 0.92.0, log splitting is done by the cluster (See See "HBASE-1364 [performance] Distributed splitting of regionserver commit logs"). This should cut down significantly on the amount of time it takes splitting logs and getting regions back online again.
In 0.92.0, Appendix E, HFile format version 2 indices and bloom filters take up residence in the same LRU used caching blocks that come from the filesystem. In 0.90.x, the HFile v1 indices lived outside of the LRU so they took up space even if the index was on a 'cold' file, one that wasn't being actively used. With the indices now in the LRU, you may find you have less space for block caching. Adjust your block cache accordingly. See the Section 9.6.4, "Block Cache" for more detail. The block size default size has been changed in 0.92.0 from 0.2 (20 percent of heap) to 0.25.
Run 0.92.0 on Hadoop 1.0.x (or CDH3u3 when it ships). The performance benefits are worth making the move. Otherwise, our Hadoop prescription is as it has been; you need an Hadoop that supports a working sync. See Section 2.1.3, "Hadoop".
If running on Hadoop 1.0.x (or CDH3u3), enable local read. See Practical Caching presentation for ruminations on the performance benefits 'going local' (and for how to enable local reads).
If you can, upgrade your zookeeper. If you can't, 3.4.2 clients should work against 3.3.X ensembles (HBase makes use of 3.4.2 API).
In 0.92.0, we've added an experimental online schema alter facility (See ???). Its off by default. Enable it at your own risk. Online alter and splitting tables do not play well together so be sure your cluster quiescent using this feature (for now).
The webui has had a few additions made in 0.92.0. It now shows a list of the regions currently transitioning, recent compactions/flushes, and a process list of running processes (usually empty if all is well and requests are being handled promptly). Other additions including requests by region, a debugging servlet dump, etc.
We now ship with two tarballs; secure and insecure HBase. Documentation on how to setup a secure HBase is on the way.
A new cache was contributed to 0.92.0 to act as a solution between using the "on-heap" cache which is the current LRU cache the region servers have and the operating system cache which is out of our control. To enable, set "-XX:MaxDirectMemorySize" in hbase-env.sh to the value for maximum direct memory size and specify hbase.offheapcache.percentage in hbase-site.xml with the percentage that you want to dedicate to off-heap cache. This should only be set for servers and not for clients. Use at your own risk. See this blog post for additional information on this new experimental feature: http://www.cloudera.com/blog/2012/01/caching-in-hbase-slabcache/
0.92.0 adds two new features: multi-slave and multi-master replication. The way to enable this is the same as adding a new peer, so in order to have multi-master you would just run add_peer for each cluster that acts as a master to the other slave clusters. Collisions are handled at the timestamp level which may or may not be what you want, this needs to be evaluated on a per use case basis. Replication is still experimental in 0.92 and is disabled by default, run it at your own risk.
If an OOME, we now have the JVM kill -9 the regionserver process so it goes down fast. Previous, a RegionServer might stick around after incurring an OOME limping along in some wounded state. To disable this facility, and recommend you leave it in place, you'd need to edit the bin/hbase file. Look for the addition of the -XX:OnOutOfMemoryError="kill -9 %p" arguments (See [HBASE-4769] - 'Abort RegionServer Immediately on OOME')
0.92.0 stores data in a new format, Appendix E, HFile format version 2. As HBase runs, it will move all your data from HFile v1 to HFile v2 format. This auto-migration will run in the background as flushes and compactions run. HFile V2 allows HBase run with larger regions/files. In fact, we encourage that all HBasers going forward tend toward Facebook axiom #1, run with larger, fewer regions. If you have lots of regions now -- more than 100s per host -- you should look into setting your region size up after you move to 0.92.0 (In 0.92.0, default size is now 1G, up from 256M), and then running online merge tool (See "HBASE-1621 merge tool should work on online cluster, but disabled table").
This version of 0.90.x HBase can be started on data written by HBase 0.20.x or HBase 0.89.x. There is no need of a migration step. HBase 0.89.x and 0.90.x does write out the name of region directories differently -- it names them with a md5 hash of the region name rather than a jenkins hash -- so this means that once started, there is no going back to HBase 0.20.x.
Be sure to remove the
hbase-default.xml from
directory on upgrade. A 0.20.x version of this file will have
sub-optimal configurations for 0.90.x HBase. The
hbase-default.xml file is now bundled into the
HBase jar and read from there. If you would like to review
the content of this file, see it in the src tree at
src/main/resources/hbase-default.xml or
see ???.
Finally, if upgrading from 0.20.x, check your
.META. schema in the shell. In the past we would
recommend that users run with a 16kb
hbase> scan '-ROOT-' in the shell. This will output
the current
.META. schema. Check
MEMSTORE_FLUSHSIZE size. Is it 16kb (16384)? If so, you will
need to change this (The 'normal'/default value is 64MB (67108864)).
Run the script
This will make the necessary edit to your
.META. schema.
Failure to run this change will make for a slow cluster [12]
Table of Contents
The Apache HBase (TM) Shell is (J)Ruby's IRB with some HBase particular commands added. Anything you can do in IRB, you should be able to do in the HBase Shell.
To run the HBase shell, do as follows:
$ ./bin/hbase shell
Type help and then <RETURN> to see a listing of shell commands and options. Browse at least the paragraphs at the end of the help emission for the gist of how variables and command arguments are entered into the HBase shell; in particular note how table names, rows, and columns, etc., must be quoted.
See Section 1.2.3, "Shell Exercises" for example basic shell operation.
For examples scripting Apache HBase, look in the
bin directory. Look at the files
that end in
*.rb. To run one of these
files, do as follows:
$ ./bin/hbase org.jruby.Main PATH_TO_SCRIPT
Create an
.irbrc file for yourself in your
home directory. Add customizations. A useful one is
command history so commands are save across Shell invocations:
$ more .irbrc require 'irb/ext/save-history' IRB.conf[:SAVE_HISTORY] = 100 IRB.conf[:HISTORY_FILE] = "#{ENV['HOME']}/.irb-save-history"
See the ruby documentation of
.irbrc to learn about other possible
To convert the date '08/08/16 20:56:29' from an hbase log into a timestamp, do:
hbase(main):021:0> import java.text.SimpleDateFormat hbase(main):022:0> import java.text.ParsePosition hbase(main):023:0> SimpleDateFormat.new("yy/MM/dd HH:mm:ss").parse("08/08/16 20:56:29", ParsePosition.new(0)).getTime() => 1218920189000
To go the other direction:
hbase(main):021:0> import java.util.Date hbase(main):022:0> Date.new(1218920189000).toString() => "Sat Aug 16 20:56:29 UTC 2008"
To output in a format that is exactly like that of the HBase log format will take a little messing with SimpleDateFormat.
You can set a debug switch in the shell to see more output -- e.g. more of the stack trace on exception -- when you run a command:
hbase> debug <RETURN>
Table of Contents
In short, applications store data into an HBase table. Tables are made of rows and columns. All columns in HBase belong to a particular column family. Table cells -- the intersection of row and column coordinates -- are versioned. A cell's content is an uninterpreted array of bytes.
Table row keys are also byte arrays so almost anything can serve as a row key from strings to binary representations of longs or even serialized data structures. Rows in HBase tables are sorted by row key. The sort is byte-ordered. All table accesses are via the table row key -- its primary key.
The following example is a slightly modified form of the one on page
2 of the BigTable paper.
There is a table called
webtable that contains two column families named
contents and
In this example,
anchor contains two
columns (
contents contains one column (
By convention, a column name is made of its column family prefix and a
qualifier. For example, the
contents:html is of the column family
The colon character (
:) delimits the column family from the
column family qualifier.
Table 5.1. Table
|Row Key
|Time Stamp
anchor:cnnsi.com = "CNN"
anchor:my.look.ca = "CNN.com"
contents:html = "<html>..."
contents:html = "<html>..."
contents:html = "<html>..."
Although at a conceptual level tables may be viewed as a sparse set of rows.
Physically they are stored on a per-column family basis. New columns
columnfamily:column) can be added to any
column family without pre-announcing them.
Table 5.2. ColumnFamily
|Row Key
|Time Stamp
|Column Family
anchor:cnnsi.com = "CNN"
anchor:my.look.ca = "CNN.com"
Table 5.3. ColumnFamily
|Row Key
|Time Stamp
|ColumnFamily "contents:"
contents:html = "<html>..."
contents:html = "<html>..."
contents:html = "<html>..."
It is important to note in the diagram above that the empty cells shown in the conceptual view are not stored since they need not be in a column-oriented storage format. Thus a request for the value of the
column at time stamp
t8 would return no value. Similarly, a
request for an
anchor:my.look.ca value at time stamp
t9 would return no value. However, if no timestamp is
supplied, the most recent value for a particular column would be returned
and would also be the first one found since timestamps are stored in
descending order. Thus a request for the values of all columns in the row
com.cnn.www if no timestamp is specified would be:
the value of
contents:html from time stamp
t6, the value of
from time stamp
t9, the value of
anchor:my.look.ca from time stamp
For more information about the internals of how Apache HBase stores data, see Section 9.7, "Regions".
Row keys are uninterrpreted bytes. Rows are lexicographically sorted with the lowest order appearing first in a table. The empty byte array is used to denote both the start and end of a tables' namespace.
Columns in Apache HBase are grouped into column families.
All column members of a column family have the same prefix. For example, the
columns courses:history and
courses:math are both members of the
courses column family.
The colon character (
:) delimits the column family from the
The column family prefix must be composed of
printable characters. The qualifying tail, the
column family qualifier, can be made of any
arbitrary bytes. Column families must be declared up front
at schema definition time whereas columns do not need to be
defined at schema time but can be conjured on the fly while
the table is up an running.
Physically, all column family members are stored together on the filesystem. Because tunings and storage specifications are done at the column family level, it is advised that all column family members have the same general access pattern and size characteristics.
A {row, column, version} tuple exactly
specifies a
cell in HBase.
Cell content is uninterrpreted bytes
The four primary data model operations are Get, Put, Scan, and Delete. Operations are applied via HTable instances.
Get returns attributes for a specified row. Gets are executed via HTable.get.
Put either adds new rows to a table (if the key is new) or can update existing rows (if the key already exists). Puts are executed via HTable.put (writeBuffer) or HTable.batch (non-writeBuffer).
Scan allow iteration over multiple rows for specified attributes.
The following is an example of a on an HTable table instance. Assume that a table is populated with rows with keys "row1", "row2", "row3", and then another set of rows with the keys "abc1", "abc2", and "abc3". The following example shows how startRow and stopRow can be applied to a Scan instance to return the rows beginning with "row".
HTable htable = ... // instantiate HTable Scan scan = new Scan(); scan.addColumn(Bytes.toBytes("cf"),Bytes.toBytes("attr")); scan.setStartRow( Bytes.toBytes("row")); // start key is inclusive scan.setStopRow( Bytes.toBytes("row" + (char)0)); // stop key is exclusive ResultScanner rs = htable.getScanner(scan); try { for (Result r = rs.next(); r != null; r = rs.next()) { // process result... } finally { rs.close(); // always close the ResultScanner! }
Delete removes a row from a table. Deletes are executed via HTable.delete.
HBase does not modify data in place, and so deletes are handled by creating new markers called tombstones. These tombstones, along with the dead values, are cleaned up on major compactions.
See Section 184.108.40.206, "Delete" for more information on deleting versions of columns, and see Section 18.104.22.168, "Compaction" for more information on compactions.
A {row, column, version} tuple exactly
specifies a
cell in HBase. It's possible to have an
unbounded number of cells where the row and column are the same but the
cell address differs only in its version dimension.
While rows and column keys are expressed as bytes, the version is
specified using a long integer. Typically this long contains time
instances such as those returned by
java.util.Date.getTime() or
System.currentTimeMillis(), that is: "the difference,
measured in milliseconds, between the current time and midnight, January
The HBase version dimension is stored in decreasing order, so that when reading from a store file, the most recent values are found first.
There is a lot of confusion over the semantics of
cell versions, in HBase. In particular, a couple
questions that often come up are:
Below we describe how the version dimension in HBase currently works[15].
In this section we look at the behavior of the version dimension for each of the core HBase operations.
Gets are implemented on top of Scans. The below discussion of Get applies equally to Scans.
By default, i.e. if you specify no explicit version, when
doing a
get, the cell whose version has the
largest value is returned (which may or may not be the latest one
written, see later). The default behavior can be modified in the
following ways:
to return more than one version, see Get.setMaxVersions()
to return versions other than the latest, see Get.setTimeRange()
To retrieve the latest version that is less than or equal to a given value, thus giving the 'latest' state of the record at a certain point in time, just use a range from 0 to the desired version and set the max versions to 1.
The following Get will only retrieve the current version of the row
Get get = new Get(Bytes.toBytes("row1")); Result r = htable.get(get); byte[] b = r.getValue(Bytes.toBytes("cf"), Bytes.toBytes("attr")); // returns current version of value
The following Get will return the last 3 versions of the row.
Get get = new Get(Bytes.toBytes("row1")); get.setMaxVersions(3); // will return last 3 versions of row Result r = htable.get(get); byte[] b = r.getValue(Bytes.toBytes("cf"), Bytes.toBytes("attr")); // returns current version of value List<KeyValue> kv = r.getColumn(Bytes.toBytes("cf"), Bytes.toBytes("attr")); // returns all versions of this column
Doing a put always creates a new version of a
cell, at a certain timestamp. By default the
system uses the server's
currentTimeMillis, but
you can specify the version (= the long integer) yourself, on a
per-column level. This means you could assign a time in the past or
the future, or use the long value for non-time purposes.
To overwrite an existing value, do a put at exactly the same row, column, and version as that of the cell you would overshadow.
The following Put will be implicitly versioned by HBase with the current time.
Put put = new Put(Bytes.toBytes(row)); put.add(Bytes.toBytes("cf"), Bytes.toBytes("attr1"), Bytes.toBytes( data)); htable.put(put);
The following Put has the version timestamp explicitly set.
Put put = new Put( Bytes.toBytes(row)); long explicitTimeInMs = 555; // just an example put.add(Bytes.toBytes("cf"), Bytes.toBytes("attr1"), explicitTimeInMs, Bytes.toBytes(data)); htable.put(put);
Caution: the version timestamp is internally by HBase for things like time-to-live calculations. It's usually best to avoid setting this timestamp yourself. Prefer using a separate timestamp attribute of the row, or have the timestamp a part of the rowkey, or both.
There are three different types of internal delete markers [16]:
Delete: for a specific version of a column.
Delete column: for all versions of a column.
Delete family: for all columns of a particular ColumnFamily
When deleting an entire row, HBase will internally create a tombstone for each ColumnFamily (i.e., not each individual column).
Deletes work by creating tombstone
markers. For example, let's suppose we want to delete a row. For
this you can specify a version, or else by default the
currentTimeMillis is used. What this means is
"delete all cells where the version is less than or equal to
this version". HBase never modifies data in place, so for
example a delete will not immediately delete (or mark as deleted)
the entries in the storage file that correspond to the delete
condition. Rather, a so-called tombstone is
written, which will mask the deleted values[17]. If the version you specified when deleting a row is
larger than the version of any value in the row, then you can
consider the complete row to be deleted.
For an informative discussion on how deletes and versioning interact, see the thread Put w/ timestamp -> Deleteall -> Put w/ timestamp fails up on the user mailing list.
Also see Section 18.104.22.168, "KeyValue" for more information on the internal KeyValue format.
Delete markers are purged during the major compaction of store, unless the KEEP_DELETED_CELLS is set in the column family. In some scenarios, users want to keep the deletes for a time and you can set the delete TTL: hbase.hstore.time.to.purge.deletes in the configuration. If this delete TTL is not set or set to 0, all delete markers including those with future timestamp are purged during the later major compaction. Otherwise, a delete marker is kept until the major compaction after marker's timestamp + delete TTL.
Deletes mask puts, even puts that happened after the delete was entered[18]. Remember that a delete writes a tombstone, which only disappears after then next major compaction has run. Suppose you do a delete of everything <= T. After this you do a new put with a timestamp <= T. This put, even if it happened after the delete, will be masked by the delete tombstone. Performing the put will not fail, but when you do a get you will notice the put did have no effect. It will start working again after the major compaction has run. These issues should not be a problem if you use always-increasing versions for new puts to a row. But they can occur even if you do not care about time: just do delete and put immediately after each other, and there is some chance they happen within the same millisecond.
"...create three cell versions at t1, t2 and t3, with a maximum-versions setting of 2. So when getting all versions, only the values at t2 and t3 will be returned. But if you delete the version at t2 or t3, the one at t1 will appear again. Obviously, once a major compaction has run, such behavior will not be the case anymore...[19]"
All data model operations HBase return data in sorted order. First by row, then by ColumnFamily, followed by column qualifier, and finally timestamp (sorted in reverse, so newest records are returned first).
There is no store of column metadata outside of the internal KeyValue instances for a ColumnFamily. Thus, while HBase can support not only a wide number of columns per row, but a heterogenous set of columns between rows as well, it is your responsibility to keep track of the column names.
The only way to get a complete set of columns that exist for a ColumnFamily is to process all the rows. For more information about how HBase stores data internally, see Section 188.8.131.52, "KeyValue".
Whether HBase supports joins is a common question on the dist-list, and there is a simple answer: it doesn't, at not least in the way that RDBMS' support them (e.g., with equi-joins or outer-joins in SQL). As has been illustrated in this chapter, the read data model operations in HBase are Get and Scan.
However, that doesn't mean that equivalent join functionality can't be supported in your application, but you have to do it yourself. The two primary strategies are either denormalizing the data upon writing to HBase, or to have lookup tables and do the join between HBase tables in your application or MapReduce code (and as RDBMS' demonstrate, there are several strategies for this depending on the size of the tables, e.g., nested loops vs. hash-joins). So which is the best approach? It depends on what you are trying to do, and as such there isn't a single answer that works for every use case.
[13] Currently, only the last written is fetchable.
[14] Yes
[15] See HBASE-2406 for discussion of HBase versions. Bending time in HBase makes for a good read on the version, or time, dimension in HBase. It has more detail on versioning than is provided here. As of this writing, the limiitation Overwriting values at existing timestamps mentioned in the article no longer holds in HBase. This section is basically a synopsis of this article by Bruno Dumon.
[16] See Lars Hofhansl's blog for discussion of his attempt adding another, Scanning in HBase: Prefix Delete Marker
[17] When HBase does a major compaction, the tombstones are processed to actually remove the dead values, together with the tombstones themselves.
[19] See Garbage Collection in Bending time in HBase
Table of Contents
A good general introduction on the strength and weaknesses modelling on the various non-rdbms datastores is Ian Varley's Master thesis, No Relation: The Mixed Blessings of Non-Relational Databases. Recommended. Also, read Section 126.96.36.199, "KeyValue" for how HBase stores data internally.
HBase schemas can be created or updated with Chapter 4, The Apache HBase Shell or by using HBaseAdmin in the Java API.
Tables must be disabled when making ColumnFamily modifications, for example..
Configuration config = HBaseConfiguration.create(); HBaseAdmin admin = new HBaseAdmin(conf); String table = "myTable"; admin.disableTable(table); HColumnDescriptor cf1 = ...; admin.addColumn(table, cf1); // adding new ColumnFamily HColumnDescriptor cf2 = ...; admin.modifyColumn(table, cf2); // modifying existing ColumnFamily admin.enableTable(table);
See Section 2.3.4, "Client configuration and dependencies connecting to an HBase cluster" for more information about configuring client connections.
Note: online schema changes are supported in the 0.92.x codebase, but the 0.90.x codebase requires the table to be disabled.
When changes are made to either Tables or ColumnFamilies (e.g., region size, block size), these changes take effect the next time there is a major compaction and the StoreFiles get re-written.
See Section 9.7.5, "Store" for more information on StoreFiles.
HBase currently does not do well with anything above two or three column families so keep the number of column families in your schema low. Currently, flushing and compactions are done on a per Region basis so if one column family is carrying the bulk of the data bringing on flushes, the adjacent families will also be flushed though the amount of data they carry is small. When many column families the flushing and compaction interaction can make for a bunch of needless i/o loading (To be addressed by changing flushing and compaction to work on a per column family basis). For more information on compactions, see Section 18.104.22.168, "Compaction".
Try to make do with one column family if you can in your schemas. Only introduce a second and third column family in the case where data access is usually column scoped; i.e. you query one column family or the other but usually not both at the one time.
Where multiple ColumnFamilies exist in a single table, be aware of the cardinality (i.e., number of rows). If ColumnFamilyA has 1 million rows and ColumnFamilyB has 1 billion rows, ColumnFamilyA's data will likely be spread across many, many regions (and RegionServers). This makes mass scans for ColumnFamilyA less efficient.
In the HBase chapter of Tom White's book Hadoop: The Definitive Guide (O'Reilly) there is a an optimization note on watching out for a phenomenon where an import process walks in lock-step with all clients in concert pounding one of the table's regions (and thus, a single node), then moving onto the next region, etc. With monotonically increasing row-keys (i.e., using a timestamp), this will happen. See this comic by IKai Lan on why monotonically increasing row keys are problematic in BigTable-like datastores: monotonically increasing values are bad. The pile-up on a single region brought on by monotonically increasing keys can be mitigated by randomizing the input records to not be in sorted order, but in general it's best to avoid using a timestamp or a sequence (e.g. 1, 2, 3) as the row-key.
If you do need to upload time series data into HBase, you should study OpenTSDB as a successful example. It has a page describing the schema it uses in HBase. The key format in OpenTSDB is effectively [metric_type][event_timestamp], which would appear at first glance to contradict the previous advice about not using a timestamp as the key. However, the difference is that the timestamp is not in the lead position of the key, and the design assumption is that there are dozens or hundreds (or more) of different metric types. Thus, even with a continual stream of input data with a mix of metric types, the Puts are distributed across various points of regions in the table.
In HBase, values are always freighted with their coordinates; as a cell value passes through the system, it'll be accompanied by its row, column name, and timestamp - always. If your rows and column names are large, especially compared to the size of the cell value, then you may run up against some interesting scenarios. One such is the case described by Marc Limotte at the tail of HBASE-3551 (recommended!). Therein, the indices that are kept on HBase storefiles (Section 184.108.40.206, "StoreFile (HFile)") to facilitate random access may end up occupyng large chunks of the HBase allotted RAM because the cell value coordinates are large. Mark in the above cited comment suggests upping the block size so entries in the store file index happen at a larger interval or modify the table schema so it makes for smaller rows and column names. Compression will also make for larger indices. See the thread a question storefileIndexSize up on the user mailing list.
Most of the time small inefficiencies don't matter all that much. Unfortunately, this is a case where they do. Whatever patterns are selected for ColumnFamilies, attributes, and rowkeys they could be repeated several billion times in your data.
See Section 220.127.116.11, "KeyValue" for more information on HBase stores data internally to see why this is important.
Try to keep the ColumnFamily names as small as possible, preferably one character (e.g. "d" for data/default).
See Section 220.127.116.11, "KeyValue" for more information on HBase stores data internally to see why this is important.
Although verbose attribute names (e.g., "myVeryImportantAttribute") are easier to read, prefer shorter attribute names (e.g., "via") to store in HBase.
See Section 188.8.131.52, "KeyValue" for more information on HBase stores data internally to see why this is important.
Keep them as short as is reasonable such that they can still be useful for required data access (e.g., Get vs. Scan). A short key that is useless for data access is not better than a longer key with better get/scan properties. Expect tradeoffs when designing rowkeys.
A long is 8 bytes. You can store an unsigned number up to 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 in those eight bytes. If you stored this number as a String -- presuming a byte per character -- you need nearly 3x the bytes.
Not convinced? Below is some sample code that you can run on your own.
// long // long l = 1234567890L; byte[] lb = Bytes.toBytes(l); System.out.println("long bytes length: " + lb.length); // returns 8 String s = "" + l; byte[] sb = Bytes.toBytes(s); System.out.println("long as string length: " + sb.length); // returns 10 // hash // MessageDigest md = MessageDigest.getInstance("MD5"); byte[] digest = md.digest(Bytes.toBytes(s)); System.out.println("md5 digest bytes length: " + digest.length); // returns 16 String sDigest = new String(digest); byte[] sbDigest = Bytes.toBytes(sDigest); System.out.println("md5 digest as string length: " + sbDigest.length); // returns 26
A common problem in database processing is quickly finding the most recent version of a value. A technique using reverse timestamps
as a part of the key can help greatly with a special case of this problem. Also found in the HBase chapter of Tom White's book Hadoop: The Definitive Guide (O'Reilly),
the technique involves appending (
Long.MAX_VALUE - timestamp) to the end of any key, e.g., [key][reverse_timestamp].
The most recent value for [key] in a table can be found by performing a Scan for [key] and obtaining the first record. Since HBase keys are in sorted order, this key sorts before any older row-keys for [key] and thus is first.
This technique would be used instead of using Section 6.4, " Number of Versions " where the intent is to hold onto all versions "forever" (or a very long time) and at the same time quickly obtain access to any other version by using the same Scan technique.
Rowkeys are scoped to ColumnFamilies. Thus, the same rowkey could exist in each ColumnFamily that exists in a table without collision.
Rowkeys cannot be changed. The only way they can be "changed" in a table is if the row is deleted and then re-inserted. This is a fairly common question on the HBase dist-list so it pays to get the rowkeys right the first time (and/or before you've inserted a lot of data).
If you pre-split your table, it is critical to understand how your rowkey will be distributed across
the region boundaries. As an example of why this is important, consider the example of using displayable hex characters as the
lead position of the key (e.g., ""0000000000000000" to "ffffffffffffffff"). Running those key ranges through
(which is the split strategy used when creating regions in
HBaseAdmin.createTable(byte[] startKey, byte[] endKey, numRegions)
for 10 regions will generate the following splits...
48 48 48 48 48 48 48 48 48 48 48 48 48 48 48 48 // 0 54 -10 -10 -10 -10 -10 -10 -10 -10 -10 -10 -10 -10 -10 -10 -10 // 6 61 -67 -67 -67 -67 -67 -67 -67 -67 -67 -67 -67 -67 -67 -67 -68 // = 68 -124 -124 -124 -124 -124 -124 -124 -124 -124 -124 -124 -124 -124 -124 -126 // D 75 75 75 75 75 75 75 75 75 75 75 75 75 75 75 72 // K 82 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 14 // R 88 -40 -40 -40 -40 -40 -40 -40 -40 -40 -40 -40 -40 -40 -40 -44 // X 95 -97 -97 -97 -97 -97 -97 -97 -97 -97 -97 -97 -97 -97 -97 -102 // _ 102 102 102 102 102 102 102 102 102 102 102 102 102 102 102 102 // f
... (note: the lead byte is listed to the right as a comment.) Given that the first split is a '0' and the last split is an 'f', everything is great, right? Not so fast.
The problem is that all the data is going to pile up in the first 2 regions and the last region thus creating a "lumpy" (and possibly "hot") region problem. To understand why, refer to an ASCII Table. '0' is byte 48, and 'f' is byte 102, but there is a huge gap in byte values (bytes 58 to 96) that will never appear in this keyspace because the only values are [0-9] and [a-f]. Thus, the middle regions regions will never be used. To make pre-spliting work with this example keyspace, a custom definition of splits (i.e., and not relying on the built-in split method) is required.
Lesson #1: Pre-splitting tables is generally a best practice, but you need to pre-split them in such a way that all the regions are accessible in the keyspace. While this example demonstrated the problem with a hex-key keyspace, the same problem can happen with any keyspace. Know your data.
Lesson #2: While generally not advisable, using hex-keys (and more generally, displayable data) can still work with pre-split tables as long as all the created regions are accessible in the keyspace.
To conclude this example, the following is an example of how appropriate splits can be pre-created for hex-keys:.
public static boolean createTable(HBaseAdmin admin, HTableDescriptor table, byte[][] splits) throws IOException { try { admin.createTable( table, splits ); return true; } catch (TableExistsException e) { logger.info("table " + table.getNameAsString() + " already exists"); // the table already exists... return false; } } public static byte[][] getHexSplits(String startKey, String endKey, int numRegions) { byte[][] splits = new byte[numRegions-1][]; BigInteger lowestKey = new BigInteger(startKey, 16); BigInteger highestKey = new BigInteger(endKey, 16); BigInteger range = highestKey.subtract(lowestKey); BigInteger regionIncrement = range.divide(BigInteger.valueOf(numRegions)); lowestKey = lowestKey.add(regionIncrement); for(int i=0; i < numRegions-1;i++) { BigInteger key = lowestKey.add(regionIncrement.multiply(BigInteger.valueOf(i))); byte[] b = String.format("%016x", key).getBytes(); splits[i] = b; } return splits; }
The maximum number of row versions to store is configured per column family via HColumnDescriptor. The default for max versions is 3. This is an important parameter because as described in Chapter 5, Data Model section HBase does not overwrite row values, but rather stores different values per row by time (and qualifier). Excess versions are removed during major compactions. The number of max versions may need to be increased or decreased depending on application needs.
It is not recommended setting the number of max versions to an exceedingly high level (e.g., hundreds or more) unless those old values are very dear to you because this will greatly increase StoreFile size.
Like maximum number of row versions, the minimum number of row versions to keep is configured per column family via HColumnDescriptor. The default for min versions is 0, which means the feature is disabled. The minimum number of row versions parameter is used together with the time-to-live parameter and can be combined with the number of row versions parameter to allow configurations such as "keep the last T minutes worth of data, at most N versions, but keep at least M versions around" (where M is the value for minimum number of row versions, M<N). This parameter should only be set when time-to-live is enabled for a column family and must be less than the number of row versions.
HBase supports a "bytes-in/bytes-out" interface via Put and Result, so anything that can be converted to an array of bytes can be stored as a value. Input could be strings, numbers, complex objects, or even images as long as they can rendered as bytes.
There are practical limits to the size of values (e.g., storing 10-50MB objects in HBase would probably be too much to ask); search the mailling list for conversations on this topic. All rows in HBase conform to the Chapter 5, Data Model, and that includes versioning. Take that into consideration when making your design, as well as block size for the ColumnFamily.
One supported datatype that deserves special mention are "counters" (i.e., the ability to do atomic increments of numbers). See Increment in HTable.
Synchronization on counters are done on the RegionServer, not in the client.
If you have multiple tables, don't forget to factor in the potential for Section 5.11, "Joins" into the schema design.
ColumnFamilies can set a TTL length in seconds, and HBase will automatically delete rows once the expiration time is reached. This applies to all versions of a row - even the current one. The TTL time encoded in the HBase for the row is specified in UTC.
See HColumnDescriptor for more information.
ColumnFamilies can optionally keep deleted cells. That means deleted cells can still be retrieved with Get or Scan operations, as long these operations have a time range specified that ends before the timestamp of any delete that would affect the cells. This allows for point in time queries even in the presence of deletes.
Deleted cells are still subject to TTL and there will never be more than "maximum number of versions" deleted cells. A new "raw" scan options returns all deleted rows and the delete markers.
See HColumnDescriptor for more information.
This section could also be titled "what if my table rowkey looks like this but I also want to query my table like that." A common example on the dist-list is where a row-key is of the format "user-timestamp" but there are reporting requirements on activity across users for certain time ranges. Thus, selecting by user is easy because it is in the lead position of the key, but time is not.
There is no single answer on the best way to handle this because it depends on...
... and solutions are also influenced by the size of the cluster and how much processing power you have to throw at the solution. Common techniques are in sub-sections below. This is a comprehensive, but not exhaustive, list of approaches.
It should not be a surprise that secondary indexes require additional cluster space and processing. This is precisely what happens in an RDBMS because the act of creating an alternate index requires both space and processing cycles to update. RBDMS products are more advanced in this regard to handle alternative index management out of the box. However, HBase scales better at larger data volumes, so this is a feature trade-off.
Pay attention to Chapter 11, Apache HBase (TM) Performance Tuning when implementing any of these approaches.
Additionally, see the David Butler response in this dist-list thread HBase, mail # user - Stargate+hbase
Depending on the case, it may be appropriate to use Section 9.4, "Client Request Filters". In this case, no secondary index is created. However, don't try a full-scan on a large table like this from an application (i.e., single-threaded client).
A secondary index could be created in an other table which is periodically updated via a MapReduce job. The job could be executed intra-day, but depending on load-strategy it could still potentially be out of sync with the main data table.
See Section 7.2.2, "HBase MapReduce Read/Write Example" for more information.
Another strategy is to build the secondary index while publishing data to the cluster (e.g., write to data table, write to index table). If this is approach is taken after a data table already exists, then bootstrapping will be needed for the secondary index with a MapReduce job (see Section 6.9.2, " Periodic-Update Secondary Index ").
Where time-ranges are very wide (e.g., year-long report) and where the data is voluminous, summary tables are a common approach. These would be generated with MapReduce jobs into another table.
See Section 7.2.4, "HBase MapReduce Summary to HBase Example" for more information.
Coprocessors act like RDBMS triggers. These were added in 0.92. For more information, see Section 9.6.3, "Coprocessors"
This section will describe common schema design questions that appear on the dist-list. These are general guidelines and not laws - each application must consider its own needs.
A common question is whether one should prefer rows or HBase's built-in-versioning. The context is typically where there are "a lot" of versions of a row to be retained (e.g., where it is significantly above the HBase default of 3 max versions). The rows-approach would require storing a timstamp in some portion of the rowkey so that they would not overwite with each successive update.
Preference: Rows (generally speaking).
Another common question is whether one should prefer rows or columns. The context is typically in extreme cases of wide tables, such as having 1 row with 1 million attributes, or 1 million rows with 1 columns apiece.
Preference: Rows (generally speaking). To be clear, this guideline is in the context is in extremely wide cases, not in the standard use-case where one needs to store a few dozen or hundred columns. But there is also a middle path between these two options, and that is "Rows as Columns."
The middle path between Rows vs. Columns is packing data that would be a separate row into columns, for certain rows. OpenTSDB is the best example of this case where a single row represents a defined time-range, and then discrete events are treated as columns. This approach is often more complex, and may require the additional complexity of re-writing your data, but has the advantage of being I/O efficient. For an overview of this approach, see Lessons Learned from OpenTSDB from HBaseCon2012.
See the Performance section Section 11.6, "Schema Design" for more information operational and performance schema design options, such as Bloom Filters, Table-configured regionsizes, compression, and blocksizes.
HBase currently supports 'constraints' in traditional (SQL) database parlance. The advised usage for Constraints is in enforcing business rules for attributes in the table (eg. make sure values are in the range 1-10). Constraints could also be used to enforce referential integrity, but this is strongly discouraged as it will dramatically decrease the write throughput of the tables where integrity checking is enabled. Extensive documentation on using Constraints can be found at: Constraint since version 0.94.
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See HBase and MapReduce up in javadocs. Start there. Below is some additional help.
For more information about MapReduce (i.e., the framework in general), see the Hadoop MapReduce Tutorial.
When TableInputFormat is used to source an HBase table in a MapReduce job, its splitter will make a map task for each region of the table. Thus, if there are 100 regions in the table, there will be 100 map-tasks for the job - regardless of how many column families are selected in the Scan.
For those interested in implementing custom splitters, see the method
getSplits in
That is where the logic for map-task assignment resides.
The following is an example of using HBase as a MapReduce source in read-only manner. Specifically, there is a Mapper instance but no Reducer, and nothing is being emitted from the Mapper. There job would be defined as follows...
Configuration config = HBaseConfiguration.create(); Job job = new Job(config, "ExampleRead"); job.setJarByClass(MyReadJob.class); // class that contains mapper Scan scan = new Scan(); scan.setCaching(500); // 1 is the default in Scan, which will be bad for MapReduce jobs scan.setCacheBlocks(false); // don't set to true for MR jobs // set other scan attrs ... TableMapReduceUtil.initTableMapperJob( tableName, // input HBase table name scan, // Scan instance to control CF and attribute selection MyMapper.class, // mapper null, // mapper output key null, // mapper output value job); job.setOutputFormatClass(NullOutputFormat.class); // because we aren't emitting anything from mapper boolean b = job.waitForCompletion(true); if (!b) { throw new IOException("error with job!"); }
...and the mapper instance would extend TableMapper...
public static class MyMapper extends TableMapper<Text, Text> { public void map(ImmutableBytesWritable row, Result value, Context context) throws InterruptedException, IOException { // process data for the row from the Result instance. } }
The following is an example of using HBase both as a source and as a sink with MapReduce. This example will simply copy data from one table to another.
Configuration config = HBaseConfiguration.create(); Job job = new Job(config,"ExampleReadWrite"); job.setJarByClass(MyReadWriteJob.class); // class that contains mapper Scan scan = new Scan(); scan.setCaching(500); // 1 is the default in Scan, which will be bad for MapReduce jobs scan.setCacheBlocks(false); // don't set to true for MR jobs // set other scan attrs TableMapReduceUtil.initTableMapperJob( sourceTable, // input table scan, // Scan instance to control CF and attribute selection MyMapper.class, // mapper class null, // mapper output key null, // mapper output value job); TableMapReduceUtil.initTableReducerJob( targetTable, // output table null, // reducer class job); job.setNumReduceTasks(0); boolean b = job.waitForCompletion(true); if (!b) { throw new IOException("error with job!"); }
An explanation is required of what
TableMapReduceUtil is doing, especially with the reducer.
TableOutputFormat is being used
as the outputFormat class, and several parameters are being set on the config (e.g., TableOutputFormat.OUTPUT_TABLE), as
well as setting the reducer output key to
ImmutableBytesWritable and reducer value to
These could be set by the programmer on the job and conf, but
TableMapReduceUtil tries to make things easier.
The following is the example mapper, which will create a
Put and matching the input
and emit it. Note: this is what the CopyTable utility does.
public static class MyMapper extends TableMapper<ImmutableBytesWritable, Put> { public void map(ImmutableBytesWritable row, Result value, Context context) throws IOException, InterruptedException { // this example is just copying the data from the source table... context.write(row, resultToPut(row,value)); } private static Put resultToPut(ImmutableBytesWritable key, Result result) throws IOException { Put put = new Put(key.get()); for (KeyValue kv : result.raw()) { put.add(kv); } return put; } }
There isn't actually a reducer step, so
TableOutputFormat takes care of sending the
to the target table.
This is just an example, developers could choose not to use
TableOutputFormat and connect to the
target table themselves.
TODO: example for
The following example uses HBase as a MapReduce source and sink with a summarization step. This example will count the number of distinct instances of a value in a table and write those summarized counts in another table.
Configuration config = HBaseConfiguration.create(); Job job = new Job(config,"ExampleSummary"); job.setJarByClass(MySummaryJob.class); // class that contains mapper and reducer Scan scan = new Scan(); scan.setCaching(500); // 1 is the default in Scan, which will be bad for MapReduce jobs scan.setCacheBlocks(false); // don't set to true for MR jobs // set other scan attrs TableMapReduceUtil.initTableMapperJob( sourceTable, // input table scan, // Scan instance to control CF and attribute selection MyMapper.class, // mapper class Text.class, // mapper output key IntWritable.class, // mapper output value job); TableMapReduceUtil.initTableReducerJob( targetTable, // output table MyTableReducer.class, // reducer class job); job.setNumReduceTasks(1); // at least one, adjust as required boolean b = job.waitForCompletion(true); if (!b) { throw new IOException("error with job!"); }
In this example mapper a column with a String-value is chosen as the value to summarize upon.
This value is used as the key to emit from the mapper, and an
IntWritable represents an instance counter.
public static class MyMapper extends TableMapper<Text, IntWritable> { private final IntWritable ONE = new IntWritable(1); private Text text = new Text(); public void map(ImmutableBytesWritable row, Result value, Context context) throws IOException, InterruptedException { String val = new String(value.getValue(Bytes.toBytes("cf"), Bytes.toBytes("attr1"))); text.set(val); // we can only emit Writables... context.write(text, ONE); } }
In the reducer, the "ones" are counted (just like any other MR example that does this), and then emits a
public static class MyTableReducer extends TableReducer<Text, IntWritable, ImmutableBytesWritable> { public void reduce(Text key, Iterable<IntWritable> values, Context context) throws IOException, InterruptedException { int i = 0; for (IntWritable val : values) { i += val.get(); } Put put = new Put(Bytes.toBytes(key.toString())); put.add(Bytes.toBytes("cf"), Bytes.toBytes("count"), Bytes.toBytes(i)); context.write(null, put); } }
This very similar to the summary example above, with exception that this is using HBase as a MapReduce source but HDFS as the sink. The differences are in the job setup and in the reducer. The mapper remains the same.
Configuration config = HBaseConfiguration.create(); Job job = new Job(config,"ExampleSummaryToFile"); job.setJarByClass(MySummaryFileJob.class); // class that contains mapper and reducer Scan scan = new Scan(); scan.setCaching(500); // 1 is the default in Scan, which will be bad for MapReduce jobs scan.setCacheBlocks(false); // don't set to true for MR jobs // set other scan attrs TableMapReduceUtil.initTableMapperJob( sourceTable, // input table scan, // Scan instance to control CF and attribute selection MyMapper.class, // mapper class Text.class, // mapper output key IntWritable.class, // mapper output value job); job.setReducerClass(MyReducer.class); // reducer class job.setNumReduceTasks(1); // at least one, adjust as required FileOutputFormat.setOutputPath(job, new Path("/tmp/mr/mySummaryFile")); // adjust directories as required boolean b = job.waitForCompletion(true); if (!b) { throw new IOException("error with job!"); }As stated above, the previous Mapper can run unchanged with this example. As for the Reducer, it is a "generic" Reducer instead of extending TableMapper and emitting Puts.
public static class MyReducer extends Reducer<Text, IntWritable, Text, IntWritable> { public void reduce(Text key, Iterable<IntWritable> values, Context context) throws IOException, InterruptedException { int i = 0; for (IntWritable val : values) { i += val.get(); } context.write(key, new IntWritable(i)); } }
It is also possible to perform summaries without a reducer - if you use HBase as the reducer.
An HBase target table would need to exist for the job summary. The HTable method
would be used to atomically increment values. From a performance perspective, it might make sense to keep a Map
of values with their values to be incremeneted for each map-task, and make one update per key at during the
cleanup method of the mapper. However, your milage may vary depending on the number of rows to be processed and
unique keys.
In the end, the summary results are in HBase.
Sometimes it is more appropriate to generate summaries to an RDBMS. For these cases, it is possible
to generate summaries directly to an RDBMS via a custom reducer. The
setup method
can connect to an RDBMS (the connection information can be passed via custom parameters in the context) and the
cleanup method can close the connection.
It is critical to understand that number of reducers for the job affects the summarization implementation, and you'll have to design this into your reducer. Specifically, whether it is designed to run as a singleton (one reducer) or multiple reducers. Neither is right or wrong, it depends on your use-case. Recognize that the more reducers that are assigned to the job, the more simultaneous connections to the RDBMS will be created - this will scale, but only to a point.
public static class MyRdbmsReducer extends Reducer<Text, IntWritable, Text, IntWritable> { private Connection c = null; public void setup(Context context) { // create DB connection... } public void reduce(Text key, Iterable<IntWritable> values, Context context) throws IOException, InterruptedException { // do summarization // in this example the keys are Text, but this is just an example } public void cleanup(Context context) { // close db connection } }
In the end, the summary results are written to your RDBMS table/s.
Although the framework currently allows one HBase table as input to a MapReduce job, other HBase tables can be accessed as lookup tables, etc., in a MapReduce job via creating an HTable instance in the setup method of the Mapper.
public class MyMapper extends TableMapper<Text, LongWritable> { private HTable myOtherTable; public void setup(Context context) { myOtherTable = new HTable("myOtherTable"); } public void map(ImmutableBytesWritable row, Result value, Context context) throws IOException, InterruptedException { // process Result... // use 'myOtherTable' for lookups }
It is generally advisable to turn off speculative execution for MapReduce jobs that use HBase as a source. This can either be done on a per-Job basis through properties, on on the entire cluster. Especially for longer running jobs, speculative execution will create duplicate map-tasks which will double-write your data to HBase; this is probably not what you want.
See Section 18.104.22.168, "Speculative Execution" for more information.
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Newer releases of Apache HBase (TM) (>= 0.92) support optional SASL authentication of clients[20].
This describes how to set up Apache HBase and clients for connection to secure HBase resources.
You need to have a working Kerberos KDC.
A HBase configured for secure client access is expected to be running on top of a secured HDFS cluster. HBase must be able to authenticate to HDFS services. HBase needs Kerberos credentials to interact with the Kerberos-enabled HDFS daemons. Authenticating a service should be done using a keytab file. The procedure for creating keytabs for HBase service is the same as for creating keytabs for Hadoop. Those steps are omitted here. Copy the resulting keytab files to wherever HBase Master and RegionServer processes are deployed and make them readable only to the user account under which the HBase daemons will run.
A Kerberos principal has three parts, with the form
email@example.com. We
recommend using
hbase as the username portion.
The following is an example of the configuration properties for
Kerberos operation that must be added to the
hbase-site.xml file on every server machine in the
cluster. Required for even the most basic interactions with a
secure Hadoop configuration, independent of HBase security.
<property> <name>hbase.regionserver.kerberos.principal</name> <value>firstname.lastname@example.com</value> </property> <property> <name>hbase.regionserver.keytab.file</name> <value>/etc/hbase/conf/keytab.krb5</value> </property> <property> <name>hbase.master.kerberos.principal</name> <value>firstname.lastname@example.com</value> </property> <property> <name>hbase.master.keytab.file</name> <value>/etc/hbase/conf/keytab.krb5</value> </property>
Each HBase client user should also be given a Kerberos principal. This
principal should have a password assigned to it (as opposed to a
keytab file). The client principal's
maxrenewlife should
be set so that it can be renewed enough times for the HBase client
process to complete. For example, if a user runs a long-running HBase
client process that takes at most 3 days, we might create this user's
principal within
kadmin with:
addprinc -maxrenewlife
Long running daemons with indefinite lifetimes that require client
access to HBase can instead be configured to log in from a keytab. For
each host running such daemons, create a keytab with
kadmin or
kadmin.local. The procedure for
creating keytabs for HBase service is the same as for creating
keytabs for Hadoop. Those steps are omitted here. Copy the resulting
keytab files to where the client daemon will execute and make them
readable only to the user account under which the daemon will run.
Add the following to the
hbase-site.xml file on every server machine in the cluster:
<property> <name>hbase.security.authentication</name> <value>kerberos</value> </property> <property> <name>hbase.security.authorization</name> <value>true</value> </property> <property> <name>hbase.coprocessor.region.classes</name> <value>org.apache.hadoop.hbase.security.token.TokenProvider</value> </property>
A full shutdown and restart of HBase service is required when deploying these configuration changes.
Add the following to the
hbase-site.xml file on every client:
<property> <name>hbase.security.authentication</name> <value>kerberos</value> </property>
The client environment must be logged in to Kerberos from KDC or
keytab via the
kinit command before communication with
the HBase cluster will be possible.
Be advised that if the
in the client- and server-side site files do not match, the client will
not be able to communicate with the cluster.
Once HBase is configured for secure RPC it is possible to optionally
configure encrypted communication. To do so, add the following to the
hbase-site.xml file on every client:
<property> <name>hbase.rpc.protection</name> <value>privacy</value> </property>
This configuration property can also be set on a per connection basis.
Set it in the
Configuration supplied to
Configuration conf = HBaseConfiguration.create(); conf.set("hbase.rpc.protection", "privacy"); HTable table = new HTable(conf, tablename);
Expect a ~10% performance penalty for encrypted communication.
Add the following to the
hbase-site.xml file for every Thrift gateway:
<property> <name>hbase.thrift.keytab.file</name> <value>/etc/hbase/conf/hbase.keytab</value> </property> <property> <name>hbase.thrift.kerberos.principal</name> <value>$firstname.lastname@example.com</value> </property>
Substitute the appropriate credential and keytab for $USER and $KEYTAB respectively.
The Thrift gateway will authenticate with HBase using the supplied credential. No authentication will be performed by the Thrift gateway itself. All client access via the Thrift gateway will use the Thrift gateway's credential and have its privilege.
Add the following to the
hbase-site.xml file for every REST gateway:
<property> <name>hbase.rest.keytab.file</name> <value>$KEYTAB</value> </property> <property> <name>hbase.rest.kerberos.principal</name> <value>$firstname.lastname@example.com</value> </property>
Substitute the appropriate credential and keytab for $USER and $KEYTAB respectively.
The REST gateway will authenticate with HBase using the supplied credential. No authentication will be performed by the REST gateway itself. All client access via the REST gateway will use the REST gateway's credential and have its privilege.
It should be possible for clients to authenticate with the HBase cluster through the REST gateway in a pass-through manner via SPEGNO HTTP authentication. This is future work.
Newer releases of Apache HBase (>= 0.92) support optional access control list (ACL-) based protection of resources on a column family and/or table basis.
This describes how to set up Secure HBase for access control, with an example of granting and revoking user permission on table resources provided.
You must configure HBase for secure operation. Refer to the section "Secure Client Access to HBase" and complete all of the steps described there.
You must also configure ZooKeeper for secure operation. Changes to ACLs are synchronized throughout the cluster using ZooKeeper. Secure authentication to ZooKeeper must be enabled or otherwise it will be possible to subvert HBase access control via direct client access to ZooKeeper. Refer to the section on secure ZooKeeper configuration and complete all of the steps described there.
With Secure RPC and Access Control enabled, client access to HBase is authenticated and user data is private unless access has been explicitly granted. Access to data can be granted at a table or per column family basis.
However, the following items have been left out of the initial implementation for simplicity:
Row-level or per value (cell): This would require broader changes for storing the ACLs inline with rows. It is a future goal.
Push down of file ownership to HDFS: HBase is not designed for the case where files may have different permissions than the HBase system principal. Pushing file ownership down into HDFS would necessitate changes to core code. Also, while HDFS file ownership would make applying quotas easy, and possibly make bulk imports more straightforward, it is not clear that it would offer a more secure setup.
HBase managed "roles" as collections of permissions: We will not model "roles" internally in HBase to begin with. We instead allow group names to be granted permissions, which allows external modeling of roles via group membership. Groups are created and manipulated externally to HBase, via the Hadoop group mapping service.
Access control mechanisms are mature and fairly standardized in the relational database world. The HBase implementation approximates current convention, but HBase has a simpler feature set than relational databases, especially in terms of client operations. We don't distinguish between an insert (new record) and update (of existing record), for example, as both collapse down into a Put. Accordingly, the important operations condense to four permissions: READ, WRITE, CREATE, and ADMIN.
Permissions can be granted in any of the following scopes, though CREATE and ADMIN permissions are effective only at table scope.
Read: User can read from any column family in table
Write: User can write to any column family in table
Create: User can alter table attributes; add, alter, or drop column families; and drop the table.
Admin: User can alter table attributes; add, alter, or drop column families; and enable, disable, or drop the table. User can also trigger region (re)assignments or relocation.
Column Family
Read: User can read from the column family
Write: User can write to the column family
There is also an implicit global scope for the superuser.
The superuser is a principal, specified in the HBase site configuration file, that has equivalent access to HBase as the 'root' user would on a UNIX derived system. Normally this is the principal that the HBase processes themselves authenticate as. Although future versions of HBase Access Control may support multiple superusers, the superuser privilege will always include the principal used to run the HMaster process. Only the superuser is allowed to create tables, switch the balancer on or off, or take other actions with global consequence. Furthermore, the superuser has an implicit grant of all permissions to all resources.
Tables have a new metadata attribute: OWNER, the user principal who owns the table. By default this will be set to the user principal who creates the table, though it may be changed at table creation time or during an alter operation by setting or changing the OWNER table attribute. Only a single user principal can own a table at a given time. A table owner will have all permissions over a given table.
Enable the AccessController coprocessor in the cluster configuration and restart HBase. The restart can be a rolling one. Complete the restart of all Master and RegionServer processes before setting up ACLs.
To enable the AccessController, modify the
hbase-site.xml file on every server machine in the cluster to look like:
<property> <name>hbase.coprocessor.master.classes</name> <value>org.apache.hadoop.hbase.security.access.AccessController</value> </property> <property> <name>hbase.coprocessor.region.classes</name> <value>org.apache.hadoop.hbase.security.token.TokenProvider, org.apache.hadoop.hbase.security.access.AccessController</value> </property>
The HBase shell has been extended to provide simple commands for editing and updating user permissions. The following commands have been added for access control list management:Grant
grant <user> <permissions> <table> [ <column family> [ <column qualifier> ] ]
<permissions> is zero or more letters from the set "RWCA": READ('R'), WRITE('W'), CREATE('C'), ADMIN('A').
Note: Grants and revocations of individual permissions on a resource are both accomplished using the
grant command. A separate
revoke command is also provided by the shell, but this is for fast revocation of all of a user's access rights to a given resource only.
revoke <user> <table> [ <column family> [ <column qualifier> ] ]
alter command has been extended to allow ownership assignment:
alter 'tablename', {OWNER => 'username'}
User Permission
user_permission command shows all access permissions for the current user for a given table:
user_permission <table>
Bulk loading in secure mode is a bit more involved than normal setup, since the client has to transfer the ownership of the files generated from the mapreduce job to HBase. Secure bulk loading is implemented by a coprocessor, named SecureBulkLoadEndpoint. SecureBulkLoadEndpoint uses a staging directory
"hbase.bulkload.staging.dir", which defaults to
/tmp/hbase-staging/. The algorithm is as follows.
-rwx--x--x, 711)
-rwxrwxrwx, 777): /tmp/hbase-staging/averylongandrandomdirectoryname
Like delegation tokens the strength of the security lies in the length and randomness of the secret directory.
You have to enable the secure bulk load to work properly. You can modify the
hbase-site.xml file on every server machine in the cluster and add the SecureBulkLoadEndpoint class to the list of regionserver coprocessors:
<property> <name>hbase.bulkload.staging.dir</name> <value>/tmp/hbase-staging</value> </property> <property> <name>hbase.coprocessor.region.classes</name> <value>org.apache.hadoop.hbase.security.token.TokenProvider, org.apache.hadoop.hbase.security.access.AccessController,org.apache.hadoop.hbase.security.access.SecureBulkLoadEndpoint</value> </property>
[20] See also Matteo Bertozzi's article on Understanding User Authentication and Authorization in Apache HBase.
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HBase is a type of "NoSQL" database. "NoSQL" is a general term meaning that the database isn't an RDBMS which supports SQL as its primary access language, but there are many types of NoSQL databases: BerkeleyDB is an example of a local NoSQL database, whereas HBase is very much a distributed database. Technically speaking, HBase is really more a "Data Store" than "Data Base" because it lacks many of the features you find in an RDBMS, such as typed columns, secondary indexes, triggers, and advanced query languages, etc.
However, HBase has many features which supports both linear and modular scaling. HBase clusters expand by adding RegionServers that are hosted on commodity class servers. If a cluster expands from 10 to 20 RegionServers, for example, it doubles both in terms of storage and as well as processing capacity. RDBMS can scale well, but only up to a point - specifically, the size of a single database server - and for the best performance requires specialized hardware and storage devices. HBase features of note are:
HBase isn't suitable for every problem.
First, make sure you have enough data. If you have hundreds of millions or billions of rows, then HBase is a good candidate. If you only have a few thousand/million rows, then using a traditional RDBMS might be a better choice due to the fact that all of your data might wind up on a single node (or two) and the rest of the cluster may be sitting idle.
Second, make sure you can live without all the extra features that an RDBMS provides (e.g., typed columns, secondary indexes, transactions, advanced query languages, etc.) An application built against an RDBMS cannot be "ported" to HBase by simply changing a JDBC driver, for example. Consider moving from an RDBMS to HBase as a complete redesign as opposed to a port.
Third, make sure you have enough hardware. Even HDFS doesn't do well with anything less than 5 DataNodes (due to things such as HDFS block replication which has a default of 3), plus a NameNode.
HBase can run quite well stand-alone on a laptop - but this should be considered a development configuration only.
HDFS is a distributed file system that is well suited for the storage of large files. It's documentation states that it is not, however, a general purpose file system, and does not provide fast individual record lookups in files. HBase, on the other hand, is built on top of HDFS and provides fast record lookups (and updates) for large tables. This can sometimes be a point of conceptual confusion. HBase internally puts your data in indexed "StoreFiles" that exist on HDFS for high-speed lookups. See the Chapter 5, Data Model and the rest of this chapter for more information on how HBase achieves its goals.
The catalog tables -ROOT- and .META. exist as HBase tables. They are filtered out
of the HBase shell's
list command, but they are in fact tables just like any other.
-ROOT- keeps track of where the .META. table is. The -ROOT- table structure is as follows:
info:regioninfo (serialized HRegionInfo
instance of .META.)
info:server (server:port of the RegionServer holding .META.)
info:serverstartcode (start-time of the RegionServer process holding .META.)
The .META. table keeps a list of all regions in the system. The .META. table structure is as follows:
[table],[region start key],[region id])
info:regioninfo (serialized
HRegionInfo instance for this region)
info:server (server:port of the RegionServer containing this region)
info:serverstartcode (start-time of the RegionServer process containing this region)
When a table is in the process of splitting two other columns will be created,
info:splitA and
which represent the two daughter regions. The values for these columns are also serialized HRegionInfo instances.
After the region has been split eventually this row will be deleted.
Notes on HRegionInfo: the empty key is used to denote table start and table end. A region with an empty start key is the first region in a table. If region has both an empty start and an empty end key, it's the only region in the table
In the (hopefully unlikely) event that programmatic processing of catalog metadata is required, see the Writables utility.
The META location is set in ROOT first. Then META is updated with server and startcode values.
For information on region-RegionServer assignment, see Section 9.7.2, "Region-RegionServer Assignment".
The HBase client
is responsible for finding RegionServers that are serving the
particular row range of interest. It does this by querying
.META. and
-ROOT- catalog tables
(TODO: Explain). After locating the required
region(s), the client directly contacts
the RegionServer serving that region (i.e., it does not go
through the master) and issues the read or write request.
This information is cached in the client so that subsequent requests
need not go through the lookup process. Should a region be reassigned
either by the master load balancer or because a RegionServer has died,
the client will requery the catalog tables to determine the new
location of the user region.
See Section 9.5.2, "Runtime Impact" for more information about the impact of the Master on HBase Client communication.
Administrative functions are handled through HBaseAdmin
For connection configuration information, see Section 2.3.4, "Client configuration and dependencies connecting to an HBase cluster".
HTable instances are not thread-safe. Only one thread use an instance of HTable at any given time. When creating HTable instances, it is advisable to use the same HBaseConfiguration instance. This will ensure sharing of ZooKeeper and socket instances to the RegionServers which is usually what you want. For example, this is preferred:
HBaseConfiguration conf = HBaseConfiguration.create(); HTable table1 = new HTable(conf, "myTable"); HTable table2 = new HTable(conf, "myTable");
as opposed to this:
HBaseConfiguration conf1 = HBaseConfiguration.create(); HTable table1 = new HTable(conf1, "myTable"); HBaseConfiguration conf2 = HBaseConfiguration.create(); HTable table2 = new HTable(conf2, "myTable");
For more information about how connections are handled in the HBase client, see HConnectionManager.
For applications which require high-end multithreaded access (e.g., web-servers or application servers that may serve many application threads in a single JVM), one solution is HTablePool. But as written currently, it is difficult to control client resource consumption when using HTablePool.
Another solution is to precreate an
HConnection using
// Create a connection to the cluster. HConnection connection = HConnectionManager.createConnection(Configuration); HTableInterface table = connection.getTable("myTable"); // use table as needed, the table returned is lightweight table.close(); // use the connection for other access to the cluster connection.close();
Constructing HTableInterface implementation is very lightweight and resources are controlled/shared if you go this route.
If Section 11.7.4, "HBase Client: AutoFlush" is turned off on
Puts are sent to RegionServers when the writebuffer
is filled. The writebuffer is 2MB by default. Before an HTable instance is
discarded, either
close() or
flushCommits() should be invoked so Puts
will not be lost.
htable.delete(Delete); does not go in the writebuffer! This only applies to Puts.
For additional information on write durability, review the ACID semantics page.
For fine-grained control of batching of
Puts or
see the batch methods on HTable.
Information on non-Java clients and custom protocols is covered in Chapter 10, Apache HBase (TM) External APIs
RowLocks are still in the client API however they are discouraged because if not managed properly these can lock up the RegionServers.
There is an oustanding ticket HBASE-2332 to remove this feature from the client.
Get and Scan instances can be optionally configured with filters which are applied on the RegionServer.
Filters can be confusing because there are many different types, and it is best to approach them by understanding the groups of Filter functionality.
Structural Filters contain other Filters.
represents a list of Filters with a relationship of
FilterList.Operator.MUST_PASS_ALL or
FilterList.Operator.MUST_PASS_ONE between the Filters. The following example shows an 'or' between two
Filters (checking for either 'my value' or 'my other value' on the same attribute).
FilterList list = new FilterList(FilterList.Operator.MUST_PASS_ONE); SingleColumnValueFilter filter1 = new SingleColumnValueFilter( cf, column, CompareOp.EQUAL, Bytes.toBytes("my value") ); list.add(filter1); SingleColumnValueFilter filter2 = new SingleColumnValueFilter( cf, column, CompareOp.EQUAL, Bytes.toBytes("my other value") ); list.add(filter2); scan.setFilter(list);
can be used to test column values for equivalence (
), inequality (
CompareOp.NOT_EQUAL), or ranges
CompareOp.GREATER). The folowing is example of testing equivalence a column to a String value "my value"...
SingleColumnValueFilter filter = new SingleColumnValueFilter( cf, column, CompareOp.EQUAL, Bytes.toBytes("my value") ); scan.setFilter(filter);
There are several Comparator classes in the Filter package that deserve special mention. These Comparators are used in concert with other Filters, such as Section 18.104.22.168, "SingleColumnValueFilter".
RegexStringComparator supports regular expressions for value comparisons.
RegexStringComparator comp = new RegexStringComparator("my."); // any value that starts with 'my' SingleColumnValueFilter filter = new SingleColumnValueFilter( cf, column, CompareOp.EQUAL, comp ); scan.setFilter(filter);
See the Oracle JavaDoc for supported RegEx patterns in Java.
SubstringComparator can be used to determine if a given substring exists in a value. The comparison is case-insensitive.
SubstringComparator comp = new SubstringComparator("y val"); // looking for 'my value' SingleColumnValueFilter filter = new SingleColumnValueFilter( cf, column, CompareOp.EQUAL, comp ); scan.setFilter(filter);
See BinaryComparator.
As HBase stores data internally as KeyValue pairs, KeyValue Metadata Filters evaluate the existence of keys (i.e., ColumnFamily:Column qualifiers) for a row, as opposed to values the previous section.
FamilyFilter can be used to filter on the ColumnFamily. It is generally a better idea to select ColumnFamilies in the Scan than to do it with a Filter.
QualifierFilter can be used to filter based on Column (aka Qualifier) name.
ColumnPrefixFilter can be used to filter based on the lead portion of Column (aka Qualifier) names.
A ColumnPrefixFilter seeks ahead to the first column matching the prefix in each row and for each involved column family. It can be used to efficiently get a subset of the columns in very wide rows.
Note: The same column qualifier can be used in different column families. This filter returns all matching columns.
Example: Find all columns in a row and family that start with "abc"
HTableInterface t = ...; byte[] row = ...; byte[] family = ...; byte[] prefix = Bytes.toBytes("abc"); Scan scan = new Scan(row, row); // (optional) limit to one row scan.addFamily(family); // (optional) limit to one family Filter f = new ColumnPrefixFilter(prefix); scan.setFilter(f); scan.setBatch(10); // set this if there could be many columns returned ResultScanner rs = t.getScanner(scan); for (Result r = rs.next(); r != null; r = rs.next()) { for (KeyValue kv : r.raw()) { // each kv represents a column } } rs.close();
MultipleColumnPrefixFilter behaves like ColumnPrefixFilter but allows specifying multiple prefixes.
Like ColumnPrefixFilter, MultipleColumnPrefixFilter efficiently seeks ahead to the first column matching the lowest prefix and also seeks past ranges of columns between prefixes. It can be used to efficiently get discontinuous sets of columns from very wide rows.
Example: Find all columns in a row and family that start with "abc" or "xyz"
HTableInterface t = ...; byte[] row = ...; byte[] family = ...; byte[][] prefixes = new byte[][] {Bytes.toBytes("abc"), Bytes.toBytes("xyz")}; Scan scan = new Scan(row, row); // (optional) limit to one row scan.addFamily(family); // (optional) limit to one family Filter f = new MultipleColumnPrefixFilter(prefixes); scan.setFilter(f); scan.setBatch(10); // set this if there could be many columns returned ResultScanner rs = t.getScanner(scan); for (Result r = rs.next(); r != null; r = rs.next()) { for (KeyValue kv : r.raw()) { // each kv represents a column } } rs.close();
A ColumnRangeFilter allows efficient intra row scanning.
A ColumnRangeFilter can seek ahead to the first matching column for each involved column family. It can be used to efficiently get a 'slice' of the columns of a very wide row. i.e. you have a million columns in a row but you only want to look at columns bbbb-bbdd.
Note: The same column qualifier can be used in different column families. This filter returns all matching columns.
Example: Find all columns in a row and family between "bbbb" (inclusive) and "bbdd" (inclusive)
HTableInterface t = ...; byte[] row = ...; byte[] family = ...; byte[] startColumn = Bytes.toBytes("bbbb"); byte[] endColumn = Bytes.toBytes("bbdd"); Scan scan = new Scan(row, row); // (optional) limit to one row scan.addFamily(family); // (optional) limit to one family Filter f = new ColumnRangeFilter(startColumn, true, endColumn, true); scan.setFilter(f); scan.setBatch(10); // set this if there could be many columns returned ResultScanner rs = t.getScanner(scan); for (Result r = rs.next(); r != null; r = rs.next()) { for (KeyValue kv : r.raw()) { // each kv represents a column } } rs.close();
Note: Introduced in HBase 0.92
It is generally a better idea to use the startRow/stopRow methods on Scan for row selection, however RowFilter can also be used.
This is primarily used for rowcount jobs. See FirstKeyOnlyFilter.
HMaster is the implementation of the Master Server. The Master server
is responsible for monitoring all RegionServer instances in the cluster, and is
the interface for all metadata changes. In a distributed cluster, the Master typically runs on the Section 9.9.1, "NameNode"[21]
If run in a multi-Master environment, all Masters compete to run the cluster. If the active Master loses its lease in ZooKeeper (or the Master shuts down), then then the remaining Masters jostle to take over the Master role.
A common dist-list question is what happens to an HBase cluster when the Master goes down. Because the HBase client talks directly to the RegionServers, the cluster can still function in a "steady state." Additionally, per Section 9.2, "Catalog Tables" ROOT and META exist as HBase tables (i.e., are not resident in the Master). However, the Master controls critical functions such as RegionServer failover and completing region splits. So while the cluster can still run for a time without the Master, the Master should be restarted as soon as possible.
The methods exposed by
HMasterInterface are primarily metadata-oriented methods:
For example, when the
HBaseAdmin method
disableTable is invoked, it is serviced by the Master server.
The Master runs several background threads:
Periodically, and when there are no regions in transition, a load balancer will run and move regions around to balance the cluster's load. See Section 184.108.40.206, "Balancer" for configuring this property.
See Section 9.7.2, "Region-RegionServer Assignment" for more information on region assignment.
Periodically checks and cleans up the .META. table. See Section 9.2.2, "META" for more information on META.
HRegionServer is the RegionServer implementation. It is responsible for serving and managing regions.
In a distributed cluster, a RegionServer runs on a Section 9.9.2, "DataNode".
The methods exposed by
HRegionRegionInterface contain both data-oriented and region-maintenance methods:
For example, when the
HBaseAdmin method
majorCompact is invoked on a table, the client is actually iterating through
all regions for the specified table and requesting a major compaction directly to each region.
The RegionServer runs a variety of background threads:
Coprocessors were added in 0.92. There is a thorough Blog Overview of CoProcessors posted. Documentation will eventually move to this reference guide, but the blog is the most current information available at this time.
The Block Cache is an LRU cache that contains three levels of block priority to allow for scan-resistance and in-memory ColumnFamilies:
For more information, see the LruBlockCache source
Block caching is enabled by default for all the user tables which means that any read operation will load the LRU cache. This might be good for a large number of use cases, but further tunings are usually required in order to achieve better performance. An important concept is the working set size, or WSS, which is: "the amount of memory needed to compute the answer to a problem". For a website, this would be the data that's needed to answer the queries over a short amount of time.
The way to calculate how much memory is available in HBase for caching is:
number of region servers * heap size * hfile.block.cache.size * 0.85
The default value for the block cache is 0.25 which represents 25% of the available heap. The last value (85%) is the default acceptable loading factor in the LRU cache after which eviction is started. The reason it is included in this equation is that it would be unrealistic to say that it is possible to use 100% of the available memory since this would make the process blocking from the point where it loads new blocks. Here are some examples:
Your data isn't the only resident of the block cache, here are others that you may have to take into account:
Currently the recommended way to measure HFile indexes and bloom filters sizes is to look at the region server web UI and checkout the relevant metrics. For keys, sampling can be done by using the HFile command line tool and look for the average key size metric.
It's generally bad to use block caching when the WSS doesn't fit in memory. This is the case when you have for example 40GB available across all your region servers' block caches but you need to process 1TB of data. One of the reasons is that the churn generated by the evictions will trigger more garbage collections unnecessarily. Here are two use cases:
Each RegionServer adds updates (Puts, Deletes) to its write-ahead log (WAL) first, and then to the Section 220.127.116.11, "MemStore" for the affected Section 9.7.5, "Store". This ensures that HBase has durable writes. Without WAL, there is the possibility of data loss in the case of a RegionServer failure before each MemStore is flushed and new StoreFiles are written. HLog is the HBase WAL implementation, and there is one HLog instance per RegionServer.The WAL is in HDFS in
/hbase/.logs/ with subdirectories per region.
For more general information about the concept of write ahead logs, see the Wikipedia Write-Ahead Log article.
When a RegionServer crashes, it will lose its ephemeral lease in ZooKeeper...TODO
When set to
true, any error
encountered splitting will be logged, the problematic WAL will be
moved into the
.corrupt directory under the hbase
rootdir, and processing will continue. If set to
false, the default, the exception will be propagated and the
split logged as failed.[22]
If we get an EOF while splitting logs, we proceed with the split
even when
hbase.hlog.split.skip.errors ==
false. An EOF while reading the last log in the
set of files to split is near-guaranteed since the RegionServer likely
crashed mid-write of a record. But we'll continue even if we got an
EOF reading other than the last file in the set.[23]
Regions are the basic element of availability and distribution for tables, and are comprised of a Store per Column Family. The heirarchy of objects is as follows:
Table(HBase table)
Region(Regions for the table)
Store(Store per ColumnFamily for each Region for the table)
MemStore(MemStore for each Store for each Region for the table)
StoreFile(StoreFiles for each Store for each Region for the table)
Block(Blocks within a StoreFile within a Store for each Region for the table)
For a description of what HBase files look like when written to HDFS, see Section 12.7.2, "Browsing HDFS for HBase Objects".
Determining the "right" region size can be tricky, and there are a few factors to consider:
HBase scales by having regions across many servers. Thus if you have 2 regions for 16GB data, on a 20 node machine your data will be concentrated on just a few machines - nearly the entire cluster will be idle. This really cant be stressed enough, since a common problem is loading 200MB data into HBase then wondering why your awesome 10 node cluster isn't doing anything.
On the other hand, high region count has been known to make things slow. This is getting better with each release of HBase, but it is probably better to have 700 regions than 3000 for the same amount of data.
There is not much memory footprint difference between 1 region and 10 in terms of indexes, etc, held by the RegionServer.
When starting off, it's probably best to stick to the default region-size, perhaps going smaller for hot tables (or manually split hot regions to spread the load over the cluster), or go with larger region sizes if your cell sizes tend to be largish (100k and up).
See Section 22.214.171.124, "Bigger Regions" for more information on configuration.
This section describes how Regions are assigned to RegionServers.
When HBase starts regions are assigned as follows (short version):
AssignmentManager upon startup.
AssignmentManager looks at the existing region assignments in META.
LoadBalancerFactory is invoked to assign the
region. The
DefaultLoadBalancer will randomly assign the region to a RegionServer.
When a RegionServer fails (short version):
Regions can be periodically moved by the Section 126.96.36.199, "LoadBalancer".
Over time, Region-RegionServer locality is achieved via HDFS block replication. The HDFS client does the following by default when choosing locations to write replicas:
Thus, HBase eventually achieves locality for a region after a flush or a compaction. In a RegionServer failover situation a RegionServer may be assigned regions with non-local StoreFiles (because none of the replicas are local), however as new data is written in the region, or the table is compacted and StoreFiles are re-written, they will become "local" to the RegionServer.
For more information, see HDFS Design on Replica Placement and also Lars George's blog on HBase and HDFS locality.
Splits run unaided on the RegionServer; i.e. the Master does not participate. The RegionServer splits a region, offlines the split region and then adds the daughter regions to META, opens daughters on the parent's hosting RegionServer and then reports the split to the Master. See Section 22.214.171.124, "Managed Splitting" for how to manually manage splits (and for why you might do this)
The default split policy can be overwritten using a custom RegionSplitPolicy (HBase 0.94+). Typically a custom split policy should extend HBase's default split policy: ConstantSizeRegionSplitPolicy.
The policy can set globally through the HBaseConfiguration used or on a per table basis:
HTableDescriptor myHtd = ...; myHtd.setValue(HTableDescriptor.SPLIT_POLICY, MyCustomSplitPolicy.class.getName());
A Store hosts a MemStore and 0 or more StoreFiles (HFiles). A Store corresponds to a column family for a table for a given region.
The MemStore holds in-memory modifications to the Store. Modifications are KeyValues. When asked to flush, current memstore is moved to snapshot and is cleared. HBase continues to serve edits out of new memstore and backing snapshot until flusher reports in that the flush succeeded. At this point the snapshot is let go.
StoreFiles are where your data lives.
The hfile file format is based on the SSTable file described in the BigTable [2006] paper and on Hadoop's tfile (The unit test suite and the compression harness were taken directly from tfile). Schubert Zhang's blog post on HFile: A Block-Indexed File Format to Store Sorted Key-Value Pairs makes for a thorough introduction to HBase's hfile. Matteo Bertozzi has also put up a helpful description, HBase I/O: HFile.
For more information, see the HFile source code. Also see Appendix E, HFile format version 2 for information about the HFile v2 format that was included in 0.92.
To view a textualized version of hfile content, you can do use
tool. Type the following to see usage:
$ ${HBASE_HOME}/bin/hbase org.apache.hadoop.hbase.io.hfile.HFile
example, to view the content of the file
type the following:
$ ${HBASE_HOME}/bin/hbase org.apache.hadoop.hbase.io.hfile.HFile -v -f hdfs://10.81.47.41:8020/hbase/TEST/1418428042/DSMP/4759508618286845475
you leave off the option -v to see just a summary on the hfile. See
usage for other things to do with the
For more information of what StoreFiles look like on HDFS with respect to the directory structure, see Section 12.7.2, "Browsing HDFS for HBase Objects".
StoreFiles are composed of blocks. The blocksize is configured on a per-ColumnFamily basis.
Compression happens at the block level within StoreFiles. For more information on compression, see Appendix C, Compression In HBase.
For more information on blocks, see the HFileBlock source code.
The KeyValue class is the heart of data storage in HBase. KeyValue wraps a byte array and takes offsets and lengths into passed array at where to start interpreting the content as KeyValue.
The KeyValue format inside a byte array is:
The Key is further decomposed as:
KeyValue instances are not split across blocks. For example, if there is an 8 MB KeyValue, even if the block-size is 64kb this KeyValue will be read in as a coherent block. For more information, see the KeyValue source code.
To emphasize the points above, examine what happens with two Puts for two different columns for the same row:
rowkey=row1, cf:attr1=value1
rowkey=row1, cf:attr2=value2
Even though these are for the same row, a KeyValue is created for each column:
Key portion for Put #1:
------------> 4
-----------------> row1
---> 2
--------> cf
------> attr1
-----------> server time of Put
-------------> Put
Key portion for Put #2:
------------> 4
-----------------> row1
---> 2
--------> cf
------> attr2
-----------> server time of Put
-------------> Put
It is critical to understand that the rowkey, ColumnFamily, and column (aka columnqualifier) are embedded within the KeyValue instance. The longer these identifiers are, the bigger the KeyValue is.
There are two types of compactions: minor and major. Minor compactions will usually pick up a couple of the smaller adjacent StoreFiles and rewrite them as one. Minors do not drop deletes or expired cells, only major compactions do this. Sometimes a minor compaction will pick up all the StoreFiles in the Store and in this case it actually promotes itself to being a major compaction.
After a major compaction runs there will be a single StoreFile per Store, and this will help performance usually. Caution: major compactions rewrite all of the Stores data and on a loaded system, this may not be tenable; major compactions will usually have to be done manually on large systems. See Section 126.96.36.199, "Managed Compactions".
Compactions will not perform region merges. See Section 14.2.2, "Merge" for more information on region merging.
To understand the core algorithm for StoreFile selection, there is some ASCII-art in the Store source code that will serve as useful reference. It has been copied below:
/* normal skew: * * older ----> newer * _ * | | _ * | | | | _ * --|-|- |-|- |-|---_-------_------- minCompactSize * | | | | | | | | _ | | * | | | | | | | | | | | | * | | | | | | | | | | | | */
Important knobs:
hbase.store.compaction.ratio Ratio used in compaction
file selection algorithm (default 1.2f).
hbase.hstore.compaction.min (.90 hbase.hstore.compactionThreshold) (files) Minimum number
of StoreFiles per Store to be selected for a compaction to occur (default 2).
hbase.hstore.compaction.max (files) Maximum number of StoreFiles to compact per minor compaction (default 10).
hbase.hstore.compaction.min.size (bytes)
Any StoreFile smaller than this setting with automatically be a candidate for compaction. Defaults to
hbase.hregion.memstore.flush.size (128 mb).
hbase.hstore.compaction.max.size (.92) (bytes)
Any StoreFile larger than this setting with automatically be excluded from compaction (default Long.MAX_VALUE).
The minor compaction StoreFile selection logic is size based, and selects a file for compaction when the file
<= sum(smaller_files) *
This example mirrors an example from the unit test
hbase.store.compaction.ratio = 1.0f
hbase.hstore.compaction.min = 3 (files)
hbase.hstore.compaction.max = 5 (files)
hbase.hstore.compaction.min.size = 10 (bytes)
hbase.hstore.compaction.max.size = 1000 (bytes)
The following StoreFiles exist: 100, 50, 23, 12, and 12 bytes apiece (oldest to newest). With the above parameters, the files that would be selected for minor compaction are 23, 12, and 12.
This example mirrors an example from the unit test
hbase.store.compaction.ratio = 1.0f
hbase.hstore.compaction.min = 3 (files)
hbase.hstore.compaction.max = 5 (files)
hbase.hstore.compaction.min.size = 10 (bytes)
hbase.hstore.compaction.max.size = 1000 (bytes)
The following StoreFiles exist: 100, 25, 12, and 12 bytes apiece (oldest to newest). With the above parameters, no compaction will be started.
This example mirrors an example from the unit test
hbase.store.compaction.ratio = 1.0f
hbase.hstore.compaction.min = 3 (files)
hbase.hstore.compaction.max = 5 (files)
hbase.hstore.compaction.min.size = 10 (bytes)
hbase.hstore.compaction.max.size = 1000 (bytes)
The following StoreFiles exist: 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, and 1 bytes apiece (oldest to newest). With the above parameters, the files that would be selected for minor compaction are 7, 6, 5, 4, 3.
hbase.store.compaction.ratio. A large ratio (e.g., 10) will produce a single giant file. Conversely, a value of .25 will
produce behavior similar to the BigTable compaction algorithm - resulting in 4 StoreFiles.
hbase.hstore.compaction.min.size. Because
this limit represents the "automatic include" limit for all StoreFiles smaller than this value, this value may need to
be adjusted downwards in write-heavy environments where many 1 or 2 mb StoreFiles are being flushed, because every file
will be targeted for compaction and the resulting files may still be under the min-size and require further compaction, etc.
HBase includes several methods of loading data into tables.
The most straightforward method is to either use the
class from a MapReduce job, or use the normal client APIs; however,
these are not always the most efficient methods.
The bulk load feature uses a MapReduce job to output table data in HBase's internal data format, and then directly loads the generated StoreFiles into a running cluster. Using bulk load will use less CPU and network resources than simply using the HBase API.
The HBase bulk load process consists of two main steps.
The first step of a bulk load is to generate HBase data files (StoreFiles) from
a MapReduce job using
HFileOutputFormat. This output format writes
out data in HBase's internal storage format so that they can be
later loaded very efficiently into the cluster.
In order to function efficiently,
HFileOutputFormat must be
configured such that each output HFile fits within a single region.
In order to do this, jobs whose output will be bulk loaded into HBase
use Hadoop's
TotalOrderPartitioner class to partition the map output
into disjoint ranges of the key space, corresponding to the key
ranges of the regions in the table.
HFileOutputFormat includes a convenience function,
configureIncrementalLoad(), which automatically sets up
TotalOrderPartitioner based on the current region boundaries of a
After the data has been prepared using
HFileOutputFormat, it is loaded into the cluster using
completebulkload. This command line tool iterates
through the prepared data files, and for each one determines the
region the file belongs to. It then contacts the appropriate Region
Server which adopts the HFile, moving it into its storage directory
and making the data available to clients.
If the region boundaries have changed during the course of bulk load
preparation, or between the preparation and completion steps, the
completebulkloads utility will automatically split the
data files into pieces corresponding to the new boundaries. This
process is not optimally efficient, so users should take care to
minimize the delay between preparing a bulk load and importing it
into the cluster, especially if other clients are simultaneously
loading data through other means.
After a data import has been prepared, either by using the
importtsv tool with the
importtsv.bulk.output" option or by some other MapReduce
job using the
HFileOutputFormat, the
completebulkload tool is used to import the data into the
running cluster.
completebulkload tool simply takes the output path
importtsv or your MapReduce job put its results, and
the table name to import into. For example:
$ hadoop jar hbase-VERSION.jar completebulkload [-c /path/to/hbase/config/hbase-site.xml] /user/todd/myoutput mytable
-c config-file option can be used to specify a file
containing the appropriate hbase parameters (e.g., hbase-site.xml) if
not supplied already on the CLASSPATH (In addition, the CLASSPATH must
contain the directory that has the zookeeper configuration file if
zookeeper is NOT managed by HBase).
Note: If the target table does not already exist in HBase, this tool will create the table automatically.
This tool will run quickly, after which point the new data will be visible in the cluster.
For more information about the referenced utilities, see Section 14.1.9, "ImportTsv" and Section 14.1.10, "CompleteBulkLoad".
Although the
importtsv tool is useful in many cases, advanced users may
want to generate data programatically, or import data from other formats. To get
started doing so, dig into
ImportTsv.java and check the JavaDoc for
The import step of the bulk load can also be done programatically. See the
LoadIncrementalHFiles class for more information.
As HBase runs on HDFS (and each StoreFile is written as a file on HDFS), it is important to have an understanding of the HDFS Architecture especially in terms of how it stores files, handles failovers, and replicates blocks.
See the Hadoop documentation on HDFS Architecture for more information.
The NameNode is responsible for maintaining the filesystem metadata. See the above HDFS Architecture link for more information.
[21] J Mohamed Zahoor goes into some more detail on the Master Architecture in this blog posting, HBase HMaster Architecture .
[22] See HBASE-2958 When hbase.hlog.split.skip.errors is set to false, we fail the split but thats it. We need to do more than just fail split if this flag is set.
[23] For background, see HBASE-2643 Figure how to deal with eof splitting logs
Table of Contents
Currently the documentation on this topic in the Apache HBase Wiki. See also the Thrift API Javadoc.
Currently most of the documentation on REST exists in the Apache HBase Wiki on REST (The REST gateway used to be called 'Stargate'). There are also a nice set of blogs on How-to: Use the Apache HBase REST Interface by Jesse Anderson.
Currently most of the documentation on Thrift exists in the Apache HBase Wiki on Thrift.
Note: this feature was introduced in Apache HBase 0.92
This allows the user to perform server-side filtering when accessing HBase over Thrift. The user specifies a filter via a string. The string is parsed on the server to construct the filter
A simple filter expression is expressed as:
"FilterName (argument, argument, ... , argument)"
You must specify the name of the filter followed by the argument list in parenthesis. Commas separate the individual arguments
If the argument represents a string, it should be enclosed in single quotes.
If it represents a boolean, an integer or a comparison operator like <, >, != etc. it should not be enclosed in quotes
The filter name must be one word. All ASCII characters are allowed except for whitespace, single quotes and parenthesis.
The filter's arguments can contain any ASCII character.
If single quotes are present in the argument, they must be escaped by a
preceding single quote
Currently, two binary operators – AND/OR and two unary operators – WHILE/SKIP are supported.
Note: the operators are all in uppercase
AND – as the name suggests, if this operator is used, the key-value must pass both the filters
OR – as the name suggests, if this operator is used, the key-value must pass at least one of the filters
SKIP – For a particular row, if any of the key-values don't pass the filter condition, the entire row is skipped
WHILE - For a particular row, it continues to emit key-values until a key-value is reached that fails the filter condition
Compound Filters: Using these operators, a
hierarchy of filters can be created. For example:
"(Filter1 AND Filter2) OR (Filter3 AND Filter4)"
Parenthesis have the highest precedence. The SKIP and WHILE operators are next and have the same precedence.The AND operator has the next highest precedence followed by the OR operator.
For example:
A filter string of the form:
"Filter1 AND Filter2 OR Filter3"
will be evaluated as:
"(Filter1 AND Filter2) OR Filter3"
A filter string of the form:
"Filter1 AND SKIP Filter2 OR Filter3"
will be evaluated as:
"(Filter1 AND (SKIP Filter2)) OR Filter3"
A compare operator can be any of the following:
NO_OP (no operation)
The client should use the symbols (<, <=, =, !=, >, >=) to express compare operators.
A comparator can be any of the following:
BinaryComparator - This lexicographically compares against the specified byte array using Bytes.compareTo(byte[], byte[])
BinaryPrefixComparator - This lexicographically compares against a specified byte array. It only compares up to the length of this byte array.
RegexStringComparator - This compares against the specified byte array using the given regular expression. Only EQUAL and NOT_EQUAL comparisons are valid with this comparator
SubStringComparator - This tests if the given substring appears in a specified byte array. The comparison is case insensitive. Only EQUAL and NOT_EQUAL comparisons are valid with this comparator
The general syntax of a comparator is:
The ComparatorType for the various comparators is as follows:
BinaryComparator - binary
BinaryPrefixComparator - binaryprefix
RegexStringComparator - regexstring
SubStringComparator - substring
The ComparatorValue can be any value.
>, 'binary:abc' will match everything that is lexicographically greater than "abc"
=, 'binaryprefix:abc' will match everything whose first 3 characters are lexicographically equal to "abc"
!=, 'regexstring:ab*yz' will match everything that doesn't begin with "ab" and ends with "yz"
=, 'substring:abc123' will match everything that begins with the substring "abc123"
<? $_SERVER['PHP_ROOT'] = realpath(dirname(__FILE__).'/..'); require_once $_SERVER['PHP_ROOT'].'/flib/__flib.php'; flib_init(FLIB_CONTEXT_SCRIPT); require_module('storage/hbase'); $hbase = new HBase('<server_name_running_thrift_server>', <port on which thrift server is running>); $hbase->open(); $client = $hbase->getClient(); $result = $client->scannerOpenWithFilterString('table_name', "(PrefixFilter ('row2') AND (QualifierFilter (>=, 'binary:xyz'))) AND (TimestampsFilter ( 123, 456))"); $to_print = $client->scannerGetList($result,1); while ($to_print) { print_r($to_print); $to_print = $client->scannerGetList($result,1); } $client->scannerClose($result); ?>
"PrefixFilter ('Row') AND PageFilter (1) AND FirstKeyOnlyFilter ()" will return all key-value pairs that match the following conditions:
1) The row containing the key-value should have prefix "Row"
2) The key-value must be located in the first row of the table
3) The key-value pair must be the first key-value in the row
"(RowFilter (=, 'binary:Row 1') AND TimeStampsFilter (74689, 89734)) OR
ColumnRangeFilter ('abc', true, 'xyz', false))" will return all key-value pairs that match both the following conditions:
1) The key-value is in a row having row key "Row 1"
2) The key-value must have a timestamp of either 74689 or 89734.
Or it must match the following condition:
1) The key-value pair must be in a column that is lexicographically >= abc and < xyz
"SKIP ValueFilter (0)" will skip the entire row if any of the values in the row is not 0
Description: This filter doesn't take any arguments. It returns only the key component of each key-value.
Syntax: KeyOnlyFilter ()
Example: "KeyOnlyFilter ()"
Description: This filter doesn't take any arguments. It returns only the first key-value from each row.
Syntax: FirstKeyOnlyFilter ()
Example: "FirstKeyOnlyFilter ()"
Description: This filter takes one argument – a prefix of a row key. It returns only those key-values present in a row that starts with the specified row prefix
Syntax: PrefixFilter ('<row_prefix>')
Example: "PrefixFilter ('Row')"
Description: This filter takes one argument
– a column prefix. It returns only those key-values present in a column that starts
with the specified column prefix. The column prefix must be of the form:
Example: "ColumnPrefixFilter('Col')"
Description: This filter takes a list of
column prefixes. It returns key-values that are present in a column that starts with
any of the specified column prefixes. Each of the column prefixes must be of the form:
Syntax:MultipleColumnPrefixFilter('<column_prefix>', '<column_prefix>', …, '<column_prefix>')
Example: "MultipleColumnPrefixFilter('Col1', 'Col2')"
Description: This filter takes one argument – a limit. It returns the first limit number of columns in the table
Syntax: ColumnCountGetFilter ('<limit>')
Example: "ColumnCountGetFilter (4)"
Description: This filter takes one argument – a page size. It returns page size number of rows from the table.
Syntax: PageFilter ('<page_size>')
Example: "PageFilter (2)"
Description: This filter takes two arguments – a limit and offset. It returns limit number of columns after offset number of columns. It does this for all the rows
Syntax: ColumnPaginationFilter('<limit>', '<offest>')
Example: "ColumnPaginationFilter (3, 5)"
Description: This filter takes one argument – a row key on which to stop scanning. It returns all key-values present in rows up to and including the specified row
Syntax: InclusiveStopFilter('<stop_row_key>')
Example: "InclusiveStopFilter ('Row2')"
Description: This filter takes a list of timestamps. It returns those key-values whose timestamps matches any of the specified timestamps
Syntax: TimeStampsFilter (<timestamp>, <timestamp>, ... ,<timestamp>)
Example: "TimeStampsFilter (5985489, 48895495, 58489845945)"
Description: This filter takes a compare operator and a comparator. It compares each row key with the comparator using the compare operator and if the comparison returns true, it returns all the key-values in that row
Syntax: RowFilter (<compareOp>, '<row_comparator>')
Example: "RowFilter (<=, 'xyz)"
Family Filter
Description: This filter takes a compare operator and a comparator. It compares each qualifier name with the comparator using the compare operator and if the comparison returns true, it returns all the key-values in that column
Syntax: QualifierFilter (<compareOp>, '<qualifier_comparator>')
Example: "QualifierFilter (=, 'Column1')"
Description: This filter takes a compare operator and a comparator. It compares each qualifier name with the comparator using the compare operator and if the comparison returns true, it returns all the key-values in that column
Syntax: QualifierFilter (<compareOp>,'<qualifier_comparator>')
Example: "QualifierFilter (=,'Column1')"
Description: This filter takes a compare operator and a comparator. It compares each value with the comparator using the compare operator and if the comparison returns true, it returns that key-value
Syntax: ValueFilter (<compareOp>,'<value_comparator>')
Example: "ValueFilter (!=, 'Value')"
Description: This filter takes two arguments – a family and a qualifier. It tries to locate this column in each row and returns all key-values in that row that have the same timestamp. If the row doesn't contain the specified column – none of the key-values in that row will be returned.
The filter can also take an optional boolean argument – dropDependentColumn. If set to true, the column we were depending on doesn't get returned.
The filter can also take two more additional optional arguments – a compare operator and a value comparator, which are further checks in addition to the family and qualifier. If the dependent column is found, its value should also pass the value check and then only is its timestamp taken into consideration
Syntax: DependentColumnFilter ('<family>', '<qualifier>', <boolean>, <compare operator>, '<value comparator')
Syntax: DependentColumnFilter ('<family>', '<qualifier>', <boolean>)
Syntax: DependentColumnFilter ('<family>', '<qualifier>')
Example: "DependentColumnFilter ('conf', 'blacklist', false, >=, 'zebra')"
Example: "DependentColumnFilter ('conf', 'blacklist', true)"
Example: "DependentColumnFilter ('conf', 'blacklist')"
Description: This filter takes a column family, a qualifier, a compare operator and a comparator. If the specified column is not found – all the columns of that row will be emitted. If the column is found and the comparison with the comparator returns true, all the columns of the row will be emitted. If the condition fails, the row will not be emitted.
This filter also takes two additional optional boolean arguments – filterIfColumnMissing and setLatestVersionOnly
If the filterIfColumnMissing flag is set to true the columns of the row will not be emitted if the specified column to check is not found in the row. The default value is false.
If the setLatestVersionOnly flag is set to false, it will test previous versions (timestamps) too. The default value is true.
These flags are optional and if you must set neither or both
Syntax: SingleColumnValueFilter(<compare operator>, '<comparator>', '<family>', '<qualifier>',<filterIfColumnMissing_boolean>, <latest_version_boolean>)
Syntax: SingleColumnValueFilter(<compare operator>, '<comparator>', '<family>', '<qualifier>)
Example: "SingleColumnValueFilter (<=, 'abc','FamilyA', 'Column1', true, false)"
Example: "SingleColumnValueFilter (<=, 'abc','FamilyA', 'Column1')"
Description: This filter takes the same arguments and behaves same as SingleColumnValueFilter – however, if the column is found and the condition passes, all the columns of the row will be emitted except for the tested column value.
Syntax: SingleColumnValueExcludeFilter(<compare operator>, '<comparator>', '<family>', '<qualifier>',<latest_version_boolean>, <filterIfColumnMissing_boolean>)
Syntax: SingleColumnValueExcludeFilter(<compare operator>, '<comparator>', '<family>', '<qualifier>')
Example: "SingleColumnValueExcludeFilter ('<=', 'abc','FamilyA', 'Column1', 'false', 'true')"
Example: "SingleColumnValueExcludeFilter ('<=', 'abc', 'FamilyA', 'Column1')"
Description: This filter is used for selecting only those keys with columns that are between minColumn and maxColumn. It also takes two boolean variables to indicate whether to include the minColumn and maxColumn or not.
If you don't want to set the minColumn or the maxColumn – you can pass in an empty argument.
Syntax: ColumnRangeFilter ('<minColumn>', <minColumnInclusive_bool>, '<maxColumn>', <maxColumnInclusive_bool>)
Example: "ColumnRangeFilter ('abc', true, 'xyz', false)"
FB's Chip Turner wrote a pure C/C++ client. Check it out.
Table of Contents
Perhaps the most important factor in avoiding network issues degrading Hadoop and HBbase performance is the switching hardware that is used, decisions made early in the scope of the project can cause major problems when you double or triple the size of your cluster (or more).
Important items to consider:
The single most important factor in this configuration is that the switching capacity of the hardware is capable of handling the traffic which can be generated by all systems connected to the switch. Some lower priced commodity hardware can have a slower switching capacity than could be utilized by a full switch.
Multiple switches are a potential pitfall in the architecture. The most common configuration of lower priced hardware is a simple 1Gbps uplink from one switch to another. This often overlooked pinch point can easily become a bottleneck for cluster communication. Especially with MapReduce jobs that are both reading and writing a lot of data the communication across this uplink could be saturated.
Mitigation of this issue is fairly simple and can be accomplished in multiple ways:
Multiple rack configurations carry the same potential issues as multiple switches, and can suffer performance degradation from two main areas:
If the the switches in your rack have appropriate switching capacity to handle all the hosts at full speed, the next most likely issue will be caused by homing more of your cluster across racks. The easiest way to avoid issues when spanning multiple racks is to use port trunking to create a bonded uplink to other racks. The downside of this method however, is in the overhead of ports that could potentially be used. An example of this is, creating an 8Gbps port channel from rack A to rack B, using 8 of your 24 ports to communicate between racks gives you a poor ROI, using too few however can mean you're not getting the most out of your cluster.
Using 10Gbe links between racks will greatly increase performance, and assuming your switches support a 10Gbe uplink or allow for an expansion card will allow you to save your ports for machines as opposed to uplinks.
Are all the network interfaces functioning correctly? Are you sure? See the Troubleshooting Case Study in Section 13.3.1, "Case Study #1 (Performance Issue On A Single Node)".
In his presentation, Avoiding
Full GCs with MemStore-Local Allocation Buffers, Todd Lipcon
describes two cases of stop-the-world garbage collections common in
HBase, especially during loading; CMS failure modes and old generation
heap fragmentation brought. To address the first, start the CMS
earlier than default by adding
-XX:CMSInitiatingOccupancyFraction and setting it down
from defaults. Start at 60 or 70 percent (The lower you bring down the
threshold, the more GCing is done, the more CPU used). To address the
second fragmentation issue, Todd added an experimental facility,
, that
must be explicitly enabled in Apache HBase 0.90.x (Its defaulted to be on in
Apache 0.92.x HBase). See
to true in your
Configuration. See the cited
slides for background and detail[24].
Be aware that when enabled, each MemStore instance will occupy at least
an MSLAB instance of memory. If you have thousands of regions or lots
of regions each with many column families, this allocation of MSLAB
may be responsible for a good portion of your heap allocation and in
an extreme case cause you to OOME. Disable MSLAB in this case, or
lower the amount of memory it uses or float less regions per server.
For more information about GC logs, see Section 12.2.3, "JVM Garbage Collection Logs".
See Section 2.5.2, "Recommended Configurations".
The number of regions for an HBase table is driven by the Section 184.108.40.206, "Bigger Regions". Also, see the architecture section on Section 9.7.1, "Region Size"
For larger systems, managing compactions and splits may be something you want to consider.
See ???. A memory setting for the RegionServer process.
See ???. This memory setting is often adjusted for the RegionServer process depending on needs.
See ???. This memory setting is often adjusted for the RegionServer process depending on needs.
See ???. If there is blocking in the RegionServer logs, increasing this can help.
See ???. If there is enough RAM, increasing this can help.
Have HBase write the checksum into the datablock and save having to do the checksum seek whenever you read. See the release note on HBASE-5074 support checksums in HBase block cache.
See Chapter 16, ZooKeeper for information on configuring ZooKeeper, and see the part about having a dedicated disk.
See Section 6.3.2, "Try to minimize row and column sizes". See also Section 184.108.40.206, "However..." for compression caveats.
The regionsize can be set on a per-table basis via
setFileSize on
HTableDescriptor in the
event where certain tables require different regionsizes than the configured default regionsize.
See Section 11.4.1, "Number of Regions" for more information.
Bloom Filters can be enabled per-ColumnFamily.
HColumnDescriptor.setBloomFilterType(NONE | ROW |
ROWCOL) to enable blooms per Column Family. Default =
NONE for no bloom filters. If
ROW, the hash of the row will be added to the bloom
on each insert. If
ROWCOL, the hash of the row +
column family + column family qualifier will be added to the bloom on
each key insert.
See HColumnDescriptor and Section 11.8.9, "Bloom Filters" for more information or this answer up in quora, How are bloom filters used in HBase?.
The blocksize can be configured for each ColumnFamily in a table, and this defaults to 64k. Larger cell values require larger blocksizes. There is an inverse relationship between blocksize and the resulting StoreFile indexes (i.e., if the blocksize is doubled then the resulting indexes should be roughly halved).
See HColumnDescriptor and Section 9.7.5, "Store"for more information.
ColumnFamilies can optionally be defined as in-memory. Data is still persisted to disk, just like any other ColumnFamily. In-memory blocks have the highest priority in the Section 9.6.4, "Block Cache", but it is not a guarantee that the entire table will be in memory.
See HColumnDescriptor for more information.
Production systems should use compression with their ColumnFamily definitions. See Appendix C, Compression In HBase for more information.
Compression deflates data on disk. When it's in-memory (e.g., in the MemStore) or on the wire (e.g., transferring between RegionServer and Client) it's inflated. So while using ColumnFamily compression is a best practice, but it's not going to completely eliminate the impact of over-sized Keys, over-sized ColumnFamily names, or over-sized Column names.
See Section 6.3.2, "Try to minimize row and column sizes" on for schema design tips, and Section 184.108.40.206, "KeyValue" for more information on HBase stores data internally.
Use the bulk load tool if you can. See Section 9.8, "Bulk Loading". Otherwise, pay attention to the below.
Tables in HBase are initially created with one region by default. For bulk imports, this means that all clients will write to the same region until it is large enough to split and become distributed across the cluster. A useful pattern to speed up the bulk import process is to pre-create empty regions. Be somewhat conservative in this, because too-many regions can actually degrade performance.
There are two different approaches to pre-creating splits. The first approach is to rely on the default
HBaseAdmin strategy
(which is implemented in
byte[] startKey = ...; // your lowest keuy byte[] endKey = ...; // your highest key int numberOfRegions = ...; // # of regions to create admin.createTable(table, startKey, endKey, numberOfRegions);
And the other approach is to define the splits yourself...
byte[][] splits = ...; // create your own splits admin.createTable(table, splits);
See Section 6.3.6, "Relationship Between RowKeys and Region Splits" for issues related to understanding your keyspace and pre-creating regions.
The default behavior for Puts using the Write Ahead Log (WAL) is that
HLog edits will be written immediately. If deferred log flush is used,
WAL edits are kept in memory until the flush period. The benefit is aggregated and asynchronous
HLog- writes, but the potential downside is that if
the RegionServer goes down the yet-to-be-flushed edits are lost. This is safer, however, than not using WAL at all with Puts.
Deferred log flush can be configured on tables via HTableDescriptor. The default value of
hbase.regionserver.optionallogflushinterval is 1000ms.
When performing a lot of Puts, make sure that setAutoFlush is set
to false on your HTable
instance. Otherwise, the Puts will be sent one at a time to the
RegionServer. Puts added via
htable.add(Put) and
htable.add( <List> Put)
wind up in the same write buffer. If
autoFlush = false,
these messages are not sent until the write-buffer is filled. To
explicitly flush the messages, call
close on the
instance will invoke
A frequently discussed option for increasing throughput on
Puts is to call
writeToWAL(false). Turning this off means
that the RegionServer will not write the
Put to the Write Ahead Log,
only into the memstore, HOWEVER the consequence is that if there
is a RegionServer failure there will be data loss.
writeToWAL(false) is used, do so with extreme caution. You may find in actuality that
it makes little difference if your load is well distributed across the cluster.
In general, it is best to use WAL for Puts, and where loading throughput is a concern to use bulk loading techniques instead.
In addition to using the writeBuffer, grouping
Puts by RegionServer can reduce the number of client RPC calls per writeBuffer flush.
There is a utility
HTableUtil currently on TRUNK that does this, but you can either copy that or implement your own verison for
those still on 0.90.x or earlier.
When writing a lot of data to an HBase table from a MR job (e.g., with TableOutputFormat), and specifically where Puts are being emitted from the Mapper, skip the Reducer step. When a Reducer step is used, all of the output (Puts) from the Mapper will get spooled to disk, then sorted/shuffled to other Reducers that will most likely be off-node. It's far more efficient to just write directly to HBase.
For summary jobs where HBase is used as a source and a sink, then writes will be coming from the Reducer step (e.g., summarize values then write out result). This is a different processing problem than from the the above case.
If all your data is being written to one region at a time, then re-read the section on processing timeseries data.
Also, if you are pre-splitting regions and all your data is still winding up in a single region even though your keys aren't monotonically increasing, confirm that your keyspace actually works with the split strategy. There are a variety of reasons that regions may appear "well split" but won't work with your data. As the HBase client communicates directly with the RegionServers, this can be obtained via HTable.getRegionLocation.
See Section 11.7.2, " Table Creation: Pre-Creating Regions ", as well as Section 11.4, "HBase Configurations"
If HBase is used as an input source for a MapReduce job, for
example, make sure that the input Scan
instance to the MapReduce job has
setCaching set to something greater
than the default (which is 1). Using the default value means that the
map-task will make call back to the region-server for every record
processed. Setting this value to 500, for example, will transfer 500
rows at a time to the client to be processed. There is a cost/benefit to
have the cache value be large because it costs more in memory for both
client and RegionServer, so bigger isn't always better.
Scan settings in MapReduce jobs deserve special attention. Timeouts can result (e.g., UnknownScannerException) in Map tasks if it takes longer to process a batch of records before the client goes back to the RegionServer for the next set of data. This problem can occur because there is non-trivial processing occuring per row. If you process rows quickly, set caching higher. If you process rows more slowly (e.g., lots of transformations per row, writes), then set caching lower.
Timeouts can also happen in a non-MapReduce use case (i.e., single threaded HBase client doing a Scan), but the processing that is often performed in MapReduce jobs tends to exacerbate this issue.
Whenever a Scan is used to process large numbers of rows (and especially when used
as a MapReduce source), be aware of which attributes are selected. If
scan.addFamily is called
then all of the attributes in the specified ColumnFamily will be returned to the client.
If only a small number of the available attributes are to be processed, then only those attributes should be specified
in the input scan because attribute over-selection is a non-trivial performance penalty over large datasets.
When columns are selected explicitly with
scan.addColumn, HBase will schedule seek operations to seek between the
selected columns. When rows have few columns and each column has only a few versions this can be inefficient. A seek operation is generally
slower if does not seek at least past 5-10 columns/versions or 512-1024 bytes.
In order to opportunistically look ahead a few columns/versions to see if the next column/version can be found that
way before a seek operation is scheduled, a new attribute
Scan.HINT_LOOKAHEAD can be set the on Scan object. The following code instructs the
RegionServer to attempt two iterations of next before a seek is scheduled:
Scan scan = new Scan(); scan.addColumn(...); scan.setAttribute(Scan.HINT_LOOKAHEAD, Bytes.toBytes(2)); table.getScanner(scan);
For MapReduce jobs that use HBase tables as a source, if there a pattern where the "slow" map tasks seem to have the same Input Split (i.e., the RegionServer serving the data), see the Troubleshooting Case Study in Section 13.3.1, "Case Study #1 (Performance Issue On A Single Node)".
This isn't so much about improving performance but rather avoiding performance problems. If you forget to close ResultScanners you can cause problems on the RegionServers. Always have ResultScanner processing enclosed in try/catch blocks...
Scan scan = new Scan(); // set attrs... ResultScanner rs = htable.getScanner(scan); try { for (Result r = rs.next(); r != null; r = rs.next()) { // process result... } finally { rs.close(); // always close the ResultScanner! } htable.close();
instances can be set to use the block cache in the RegionServer via the
setCacheBlocks method. For input Scans to MapReduce jobs, this should be
false. For frequently accessed rows, it is advisable to use the block
When performing a table scan
where only the row keys are needed (no families, qualifiers, values or timestamps), add a FilterList with a
MUST_PASS_ALL operator to the scanner using
setFilter. The filter list
should include both a FirstKeyOnlyFilter
and a KeyOnlyFilter.
Using this filter combination will result in a worst case scenario of a RegionServer reading a single value from disk
and minimal network traffic to the client for a single row.
When performing a high number of concurrent reads, monitor the data spread of the target tables. If the target table(s) have too few regions then the reads could likely be served from too few nodes.
See Section 11.7.2, " Table Creation: Pre-Creating Regions ", as well as Section 11.4, "HBase Configurations"
Enabling Bloom Filters can save your having to go to disk and can help improve read latencys.
Bloom filters were developed over in HBase-1200 Add bloomfilters.[25][26]
See also Section 11.6.4, "Bloom Filters".
Bloom filters add an entry to the
FileInfo data structure and then two
extra entries to the
StoreFile metadata
FileInfo has a
BLOOM_FILTER_TYPE entry which is set to
ROW or
BLOOM_FILTER_META holds Bloom Size, Hash
Function used, etc. Its small in size and is cached on
StoreFile.Reader load
BLOOM_FILTER_DATA is the actual bloomfilter
data. Obtained on-demand. Stored in the LRU cache, if it is enabled
(Its enabled by default).
io.hfile.bloom.enabled in
Configuration serves as the kill switch in case
something goes wrong. Default =
io.hfile.bloom.error.rate = average false
positive rate. Default = 1%. Decrease rate by ½ (e.g. to .5%) == +1
bit per bloom entry.
io.hfile.bloom.max.fold = guaranteed minimum
fold rate. Most people should leave this alone. Default = 7, or can
collapse to at least 1/128th of original size. See the
Development Process section of the document BloomFilters
in HBase for more on what this option means.
HBase tables are sometimes used as queues. In this case, special care must be taken to regularly perform major compactions on tables used in this manner. As is documented in Chapter 5, Data Model, marking rows as deleted creates additional StoreFiles which then need to be processed on reads. Tombstones only get cleaned up with major compactions.
See also Section 220.127.116.11, "Compaction" and HBaseAdmin.majorCompact.
Be aware that
htable.delete(Delete) doesn't use the writeBuffer. It will execute an RegionServer RPC with each invocation.
For a large number of deletes, consider
See http://hbase.apache.org/apidocs/org/apache/hadoop/hbase/client/HTable.html#delete%28org.apache.hadoop.hbase.client.Delete%29
Because HBase runs on Section 9.9, "HDFS" it is important to understand how it works and how it affects HBase.
The original use-case for HDFS was batch processing. As such, there low-latency reads were historically not a priority. With the increased adoption of Apache HBase this is changing, and several improvements are already in development. See the Umbrella Jira Ticket for HDFS Improvements for HBase.
Since Hadoop 1.0.0 (also 0.22.1, 0.23.1, CDH3u3 and HDP 1.0) via HDFS-2246, it is possible for the DFSClient to take a "short circuit" and read directly from disk instead of going through the DataNode when the data is local. What this means for HBase is that the RegionServers can read directly off their machine's disks instead of having to open a socket to talk to the DataNode, the former being generally much faster[27]. Also see HBase, mail # dev - read short circuit thread for more discussion around short circuit reads.
To enable "short circuit" reads, you must set two configurations.
First, the hdfs-site.xml needs to be amended. Set
the property
to be the only user that can use the shortcut.
This has to be the user that started HBase. Then in hbase-site.xml,
dfs.client.read.shortcircuit to be
For optimal performance when short-circuit reads are enabled, it is recommended that HDFS checksums are disabled.
To maintain data integrity with HDFS checksums disabled, HBase can be configured to write its own checksums into
its datablocks and verify against these. See Section 11.4.9, "
The DataNodes need to be restarted in order to pick up the new configuration. Be aware that if a process started under another username than the one configured here also has the shortcircuit enabled, it will get an Exception regarding an unauthorized access but the data will still be read.
A fairly common question on the dist-list is why HBase isn't as performant as HDFS files in a batch context (e.g., as a MapReduce source or sink). The short answer is that HBase is doing a lot more than HDFS (e.g., reading the KeyValues, returning the most current row or specified timestamps, etc.), and as such HBase is 4-5 times slower than HDFS in this processing context. Not that there isn't room for improvement (and this gap will, over time, be reduced), but HDFS will always be faster in this use-case.
Performance questions are common on Amazon EC2 environments because it is a shared environment. You will not see the same throughput as a dedicated server. In terms of running tests on EC2, run them several times for the same reason (i.e., it's a shared environment and you don't know what else is happening on the server).
If you are running on EC2 and post performance questions on the dist-list, please state this fact up-front that because EC2 issues are practically a separate class of performance issues.
For Performance and Troubleshooting Case Studies, see Chapter 13, Apache HBase (TM) Case Studies.
[24] The latest jvms do better regards fragmentation so make sure you are running a recent release. Read down in the message, Identifying concurrent mode failures caused by fragmentation.
[25] For description of the development process -- why static blooms rather than dynamic -- and for an overview of the unique properties that pertain to blooms in HBase, as well as possible future directions, see the Development Process section of the document BloomFilters in HBase attached to HBase-1200.
[26] The bloom filters described here are actually version two of blooms in HBase. In versions up to 0.19.x, HBase had a dynamic bloom option based on work done by the European Commission One-Lab Project 034819. The core of the HBase bloom work was later pulled up into Hadoop to implement org.apache.hadoop.io.BloomMapFile. Version 1 of HBase blooms never worked that well. Version 2 is a rewrite from scratch though again it starts with the one-lab work.
[27] See JD's Performance Talk
Table of Contents
LeaseException when calling
Always start with the master log (TODO: Which lines?). Normally it's just printing the same lines over and over again. If not, then there's an issue. Google or search-hadoop.com should return some hits for those exceptions you're seeing.
An error rarely comes alone in Apache HBase (TM), usually when something gets screwed up what will follow may be hundreds of exceptions and stack traces coming from all over the place. The best way to approach this type of problem is to walk the log up to where it all began, for example one trick with RegionServers is that they will print some metrics when aborting so grepping for Dump should get you around the start of the problem.
RegionServer suicides are "normal", as this is what they do when something goes wrong.
For example, if ulimit and xcievers (the two most important initial settings, see Section 18.104.22.168, "
aren't changed, it will make it impossible at some point for DataNodes to create new threads
that from the HBase point of view is seen as if HDFS was gone. Think about what would happen if your
MySQL database was suddenly unable to access files on your local file system, well it's the same with
HBase and HDFS. Another very common reason to see RegionServers committing seppuku is when they enter
prolonged garbage collection pauses that last longer than the default ZooKeeper session timeout.
For more information on GC pauses, see the
3 part blog post by Todd Lipcon
and Section 188.8.131.52, "Long GC pauses" above.
The key process logs are as follows... (replace <user> with the user that started the service, and <hostname> for the machine name)
For stand-alone deployments the logs are obviously going to be on a single machine, however this is a development configuration only. Production deployments need to run on a cluster.
The NameNode log is on the NameNode server. The HBase Master is typically run on the NameNode server, and well as ZooKeeper.
For smaller clusters the JobTracker is typically run on the NameNode server as well.
Enabling the RPC-level logging on a RegionServer can often given
insight on timings at the server. Once enabled, the amount of log
spewed is voluminous. It is not recommended that you leave this
logging on for more than short bursts of time. To enable RPC-level
logging, browse to the RegionServer UI and click on
Log Level. Set the log level to
DEBUG for the package
org.apache.hadoop.ipc (Thats right, for
hadoop.ipc, NOT,
hbase.ipc). Then tail the RegionServers log. Analyze.
To disable, set the logging level back to
INFO level.
HBase is memory intensive, and using the default GC you can see long pauses in all threads including the Juliet Pause aka "GC of Death". To help debug this or confirm this is happening GC logging can be turned on in the Java virtual machine.
To enable, in
hbase-env.sh add:
export HBASE_OPTS="-XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC -verbose:gc -XX:+PrintGCDetails -XX:+PrintGCTimeStamps -Xloggc:/home/hadoop/hbase/logs/gc-hbase.log"
Adjust the log directory to wherever you log. Note: The GC log does NOT roll automatically, so you'll have to keep an eye on it so it doesn't fill up the disk.
At this point you should see logs like so:
64898.952: [GC [1 CMS-initial-mark: 2811538K(3055704K)] 2812179K(3061272K), 0.0007360 secs] [Times: user=0.00 sys=0.00, real=0.00 secs] 64898.953: [CMS-concurrent-mark-start] 64898.971: [GC 64898.971: [ParNew: 5567K->576K(5568K), 0.0101110 secs] 2817105K->2812715K(3061272K), 0.0102200 secs] [Times: user=0.07 sys=0.00, real=0.01 secs]
In this section, the first line indicates a 0.0007360 second pause for the CMS to initially mark. This pauses the entire VM, all threads for that period of time.
The third line indicates a "minor GC", which pauses the VM for 0.0101110 seconds - aka 10 milliseconds. It has reduced the "ParNew" from about 5.5m to 576k. Later on in this cycle we see:
64901.445: [CMS-concurrent-mark: 1.542/2.492 secs] [Times: user=10.49 sys=0.33, real=2.49 secs] 64901.445: [CMS-concurrent-preclean-start] 64901.453: [GC 64901.453: [ParNew: 5505K->573K(5568K), 0.0062440 secs] 2868746K->2864292K(3061272K), 0.0063360 secs] [Times: user=0.05 sys=0.00, real=0.01 secs] 64901.476: [GC 64901.476: [ParNew: 5563K->575K(5568K), 0.0072510 secs] 2869283K->2864837K(3061272K), 0.0073320 secs] [Times: user=0.05 sys=0.01, real=0.01 secs] 64901.500: [GC 64901.500: [ParNew: 5517K->573K(5568K), 0.0120390 secs] 2869780K->2865267K(3061272K), 0.0121150 secs] [Times: user=0.09 sys=0.00, real=0.01 secs] 64901.529: [GC 64901.529: [ParNew: 5507K->569K(5568K), 0.0086240 secs] 2870200K->2865742K(3061272K), 0.0087180 secs] [Times: user=0.05 sys=0.00, real=0.01 secs] 64901.554: [GC 64901.555: [ParNew: 5516K->575K(5568K), 0.0107130 secs] 2870689K->2866291K(3061272K), 0.0107820 secs] [Times: user=0.06 sys=0.00, real=0.01 secs] 64901.578: [CMS-concurrent-preclean: 0.070/0.133 secs] [Times: user=0.48 sys=0.01, real=0.14 secs] 64901.578: [CMS-concurrent-abortable-preclean-start] 64901.584: [GC 64901.584: [ParNew: 5504K->571K(5568K), 0.0087270 secs] 2871220K->2866830K(3061272K), 0.0088220 secs] [Times: user=0.05 sys=0.00, real=0.01 secs] 64901.609: [GC 64901.609: [ParNew: 5512K->569K(5568K), 0.0063370 secs] 2871771K->2867322K(3061272K), 0.0064230 secs] [Times: user=0.06 sys=0.00, real=0.01 secs] 64901.615: [CMS-concurrent-abortable-preclean: 0.007/0.037 secs] [Times: user=0.13 sys=0.00, real=0.03 secs] 64901.616: [GC[YG occupancy: 645 K (5568 K)]64901.616: [Rescan (parallel) , 0.0020210 secs]64901.618: [weak refs processing, 0.0027950 secs] [1 CMS-remark: 2866753K(3055704K)] 2867399K(3061272K), 0.0049380 secs] [Times: user=0.00 sys=0.01, real=0.01 secs] 64901.621: [CMS-concurrent-sweep-start]
The first line indicates that the CMS concurrent mark (finding garbage) has taken 2.4 seconds. But this is a _concurrent_ 2.4 seconds, Java has not been paused at any point in time.
There are a few more minor GCs, then there is a pause at the 2nd last line:
64901.616: [GC[YG occupancy: 645 K (5568 K)]64901.616: [Rescan (parallel) , 0.0020210 secs]64901.618: [weak refs processing, 0.0027950 secs] [1 CMS-remark: 2866753K(3055704K)] 2867399K(3061272K), 0.0049380 secs] [Times: user=0.00 sys=0.01, real=0.01 secs]
The pause here is 0.0049380 seconds (aka 4.9 milliseconds) to 'remark' the heap.
At this point the sweep starts, and you can watch the heap size go down:
64901.637: [GC 64901.637: [ParNew: 5501K->569K(5568K), 0.0097350 secs] 2871958K->2867441K(3061272K), 0.0098370 secs] [Times: user=0.05 sys=0.00, real=0.01 secs] ... lines removed ... 64904.936: [GC 64904.936: [ParNew: 5532K->568K(5568K), 0.0070720 secs] 1365024K->1360689K(3061272K), 0.0071930 secs] [Times: user=0.05 sys=0.00, real=0.01 secs] 64904.953: [CMS-concurrent-sweep: 2.030/3.332 secs] [Times: user=9.57 sys=0.26, real=3.33 secs]
At this point, the CMS sweep took 3.332 seconds, and heap went from about ~ 2.8 GB to 1.3 GB (approximate).
The key points here is to keep all these pauses low. CMS pauses are always low, but if your ParNew starts growing, you can see minor GC pauses approach 100ms, exceed 100ms and hit as high at 400ms.
This can be due to the size of the ParNew, which should be relatively small. If your ParNew is very large after running HBase for a while, in one example a ParNew was about 150MB, then you might have to constrain the size of ParNew (The larger it is, the longer the collections take but if its too small, objects are promoted to old gen too quickly). In the below we constrain new gen size to 64m.
Add this to HBASE_OPTS:
export HBASE_OPTS="-XX:NewSize=64m -XX:MaxNewSize=64m <cms options from above> <gc logging options from above>"
For more information on GC pauses, see the 3 part blog post by Todd Lipcon and Section 22.214.171.124, "Long GC pauses" above.
search-hadoop.com indexes all the mailing lists and is great for historical searches. Search here first when you have an issue as its more than likely someone has already had your problem.
Ask a question on the Apache HBase mailing lists. The 'dev' mailing list is aimed at the community of developers actually building Apache HBase and for features currently under development, and 'user' is generally used for questions on released versions of Apache HBase. Before going to the mailing list, make sure your question has not already been answered by searching the mailing list archives first. Use Section 12.3.1, "search-hadoop.com". Take some time crafting your question[28]; a quality question that includes all context and exhibits evidence the author has tried to find answers in the manual and out on lists is more likely to get a prompt response.
JIRA is also really helpful when looking for Hadoop/HBase-specific issues.
The Master starts a web-interface on port 60010 by default.
The Master web UI lists created tables and their definition (e.g., ColumnFamilies, blocksize, etc.). Additionally, the available RegionServers in the cluster are listed along with selected high-level metrics (requests, number of regions, usedHeap, maxHeap). The Master web UI allows navigation to each RegionServer's web UI.
RegionServers starts a web-interface on port 60030 by default.
The RegionServer web UI lists online regions and their start/end keys, as well as point-in-time RegionServer metrics (requests, regions, storeFileIndexSize, compactionQueueSize, etc.).
See Section 14.4, "HBase Metrics" for more information in metric definitions.
zkcli is a very useful tool for investigating ZooKeeper-related issues. To invoke:
./hbase zkcli -server host:port <cmd> <args>
The commands (and arguments) are:
connect host:port get path [watch] ls path [watch] set path data [version] delquota [-n|-b] path quit printwatches on|off create [-s] [-e] path data acl stat path [watch] close ls2 path [watch] history listquota path setAcl path acl getAcl path sync path redo cmdno addauth scheme auth delete path [version] setquota -n|-b val path
tail is the command line tool that lets you look at the end of a file. Add the "-f" option and it will refresh when new data is available. It's useful when you are wondering what's happening, for example, when a cluster is taking a long time to shutdown or startup as you can just fire a new terminal and tail the master log (and maybe a few RegionServers).
top is probably one of the most important tool when first trying to see what's running on a machine and how the resources are consumed. Here's an example from production system:
top - 14:46:59 up 39 days, 11:55, 1 user, load average: 3.75, 3.57, 3.84 Tasks: 309 total, 1 running, 308 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie Cpu(s): 4.5%us, 1.6%sy, 0.0%ni, 91.7%id, 1.4%wa, 0.1%hi, 0.6%si, 0.0%st Mem: 24414432k total, 24296956k used, 117476k free, 7196k buffers Swap: 16008732k total, 14348k used, 15994384k free, 11106908k cached PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND 15558 hadoop 18 -2 3292m 2.4g 3556 S 79 10.4 6523:52 java 13268 hadoop 18 -2 8967m 8.2g 4104 S 21 35.1 5170:30 java 8895 hadoop 18 -2 1581m 497m 3420 S 11 2.1 4002:32 java …
Here we can see that the system load average during the last five minutes is 3.75, which very roughly means that on average 3.75 threads were waiting for CPU time during these 5 minutes. In general, the "perfect" utilization equals to the number of cores, under that number the machine is under utilized and over that the machine is over utilized. This is an important concept, see this article to understand it more: http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/9001.
Apart from load, we can see that the system is using almost all its available RAM but most of it is used for the OS cache (which is good). The swap only has a few KBs in it and this is wanted, high numbers would indicate swapping activity which is the nemesis of performance of Java systems. Another way to detect swapping is when the load average goes through the roof (although this could also be caused by things like a dying disk, among others).
The list of processes isn't super useful by default, all we know is that 3 java processes are using about 111% of the CPUs. To know which is which, simply type "c" and each line will be expanded. Typing "1" will give you the detail of how each CPU is used instead of the average for all of them like shown here.
jps is shipped with every JDK and gives the java process ids for the current user (if root, then it gives the ids for all users). Example:
hadoop@sv4borg12:~$ jps 1322 TaskTracker 17789 HRegionServer 27862 Child 1158 DataNode 25115 HQuorumPeer 2950 Jps 19750 ThriftServer 18776 jmx
In order, we see a:
You can then do stuff like checking out the full command line that started the process:
hadoop@sv4borg12:~$ ps aux | grep HRegionServer hadoop 17789 155 35.2 9067824 8604364 ? S<l Mar04 9855:48 /usr/java/jdk1.6.0_14/bin/java -Xmx8000m -XX:+DoEscapeAnalysis -XX:+AggressiveOpts -XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC -XX:NewSize=64m -XX:MaxNewSize=64m -XX:CMSInitiatingOccupancyFraction=88 -verbose:gc -XX:+PrintGCDetails -XX:+PrintGCTimeStamps -Xloggc:/export1/hadoop/logs/gc-hbase.log -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.port=10102 -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.authenticate=true -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.ssl=false -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.password.file=/home/hadoop/hbase/conf/jmxremote.password -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote -Dhbase.log.dir=/export1/hadoop/logs -Dhbase.log.file=hbase-hadoop-regionserver-sv4borg12.log -Dhbase.home.dir=/home/hadoop/hbase -Dhbase.id.str=hadoop -Dhbase.root.logger=INFO,DRFA -Djava.library.path=/home/hadoop/hbase/lib/native/Linux-amd64-64 -classpath /home/hadoop/hbase/bin/../conf:[many jars]:/home/hadoop/hadoop/conf org.apache.hadoop.hbase.regionserver.HRegionServer start
jstack is one of the most important tools when trying to figure out what a java process is doing apart from looking at the logs. It has to be used in conjunction with jps in order to give it a process id. It shows a list of threads, each one has a name, and they appear in the order that they were created (so the top ones are the most recent threads). Here's a few example:
The main thread of a RegionServer that's waiting for something to do from the master:
"regionserver60020" prio=10 tid=0x0000000040ab4000 nid=0x45cf waiting on condition [0x00007f16b6a96000..0x00007f16b6a96a70] java.lang.Thread.State: TIMED_WAITING (parking) at sun.misc.Unsafe.park(Native Method) - parking to wait for <0x00007f16cd5c2f30> (a java.util.concurrent.locks.AbstractQueuedSynchronizer$ConditionObject) at java.util.concurrent.locks.LockSupport.parkNanos(LockSupport.java:198) at java.util.concurrent.locks.AbstractQueuedSynchronizer$ConditionObject.awaitNanos(AbstractQueuedSynchronizer.java:1963) at java.util.concurrent.LinkedBlockingQueue.poll(LinkedBlockingQueue.java:395) at org.apache.hadoop.hbase.regionserver.HRegionServer.run(HRegionServer.java:647) at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:619) The MemStore flusher thread that is currently flushing to a file: "regionserver60020.cacheFlusher" daemon prio=10 tid=0x0000000040f4e000 nid=0x45eb in Object.wait() [0x00007f16b5b86000..0x00007f16b5b87af0] java.lang.Thread.State: WAITING (on object monitor) at java.lang.Object.wait(Native Method) at java.lang.Object.wait(Object.java:485) at org.apache.hadoop.ipc.Client.call(Client.java:803) - locked <0x00007f16cb14b3a8> (a org.apache.hadoop.ipc.Client$Call) at org.apache.hadoop.ipc.RPC$Invoker.invoke(RPC.java:221) at $Proxy1.complete(Unknown Source) at sun.reflect.GeneratedMethodAccessor38.invoke(Unknown Source) at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.java:25) at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:597) at org.apache.hadoop.io.retry.RetryInvocationHandler.invokeMethod(RetryInvocationHandler.java:82) at org.apache.hadoop.io.retry.RetryInvocationHandler.invoke(RetryInvocationHandler.java:59) at $Proxy1.complete(Unknown Source) at org.apache.hadoop.hdfs.DFSClient$DFSOutputStream.closeInternal(DFSClient.java:3390) - locked <0x00007f16cb14b470> (a org.apache.hadoop.hdfs.DFSClient$DFSOutputStream) at org.apache.hadoop.hdfs.DFSClient$DFSOutputStream.close(DFSClient.java:3304) at org.apache.hadoop.fs.FSDataOutputStream$PositionCache.close(FSDataOutputStream.java:61) at org.apache.hadoop.fs.FSDataOutputStream.close(FSDataOutputStream.java:86) at org.apache.hadoop.hbase.io.hfile.HFile$Writer.close(HFile.java:650) at org.apache.hadoop.hbase.regionserver.StoreFile$Writer.close(StoreFile.java:853) at org.apache.hadoop.hbase.regionserver.Store.internalFlushCache(Store.java:467) - locked <0x00007f16d00e6f08> (a java.lang.Object) at org.apache.hadoop.hbase.regionserver.Store.flushCache(Store.java:427) at org.apache.hadoop.hbase.regionserver.Store.access$100(Store.java:80) at org.apache.hadoop.hbase.regionserver.Store$StoreFlusherImpl.flushCache(Store.java:1359) at org.apache.hadoop.hbase.regionserver.HRegion.internalFlushcache(HRegion.java:907) at org.apache.hadoop.hbase.regionserver.HRegion.internalFlushcache(HRegion.java:834) at org.apache.hadoop.hbase.regionserver.HRegion.flushcache(HRegion.java:786) at org.apache.hadoop.hbase.regionserver.MemStoreFlusher.flushRegion(MemStoreFlusher.java:250) at org.apache.hadoop.hbase.regionserver.MemStoreFlusher.flushRegion(MemStoreFlusher.java:224) at org.apache.hadoop.hbase.regionserver.MemStoreFlusher.run(MemStoreFlusher.java:146)
A handler thread that's waiting for stuff to do (like put, delete, scan, etc):
"IPC Server handler 16 on 60020" daemon prio=10 tid=0x00007f16b011d800 nid=0x4a5e waiting on condition [0x00007f16afefd000..0x00007f16afefd9f0] java.lang.Thread.State: WAITING (parking) at sun.misc.Unsafe.park(Native Method) - parking to wait for <0x00007f16cd3f8dd8> (a java.util.concurrent.locks.AbstractQueuedSynchronizer$ConditionObject) at java.util.concurrent.locks.LockSupport.park(LockSupport.java:158) at java.util.concurrent.locks.AbstractQueuedSynchronizer$ConditionObject.await(AbstractQueuedSynchronizer.java:1925) at java.util.concurrent.LinkedBlockingQueue.take(LinkedBlockingQueue.java:358) at org.apache.hadoop.hbase.ipc.HBaseServer$Handler.run(HBaseServer.java:1013)
And one that's busy doing an increment of a counter (it's in the phase where it's trying to create a scanner in order to read the last value):
"IPC Server handler 66 on 60020" daemon prio=10 tid=0x00007f16b006e800 nid=0x4a90 runnable [0x00007f16acb77000..0x00007f16acb77cf0] java.lang.Thread.State: RUNNABLE at org.apache.hadoop.hbase.regionserver.KeyValueHeap.<init>(KeyValueHeap.java:56) at org.apache.hadoop.hbase.regionserver.StoreScanner.<init>(StoreScanner.java:79) at org.apache.hadoop.hbase.regionserver.Store.getScanner(Store.java:1202) at org.apache.hadoop.hbase.regionserver.HRegion$RegionScanner.<init>(HRegion.java:2209) at org.apache.hadoop.hbase.regionserver.HRegion.instantiateInternalScanner(HRegion.java:1063) at org.apache.hadoop.hbase.regionserver.HRegion.getScanner(HRegion.java:1055) at org.apache.hadoop.hbase.regionserver.HRegion.getScanner(HRegion.java:1039) at org.apache.hadoop.hbase.regionserver.HRegion.getLastIncrement(HRegion.java:2875) at org.apache.hadoop.hbase.regionserver.HRegion.incrementColumnValue(HRegion.java:2978) at org.apache.hadoop.hbase.regionserver.HRegionServer.incrementColumnValue(HRegionServer.java:2433) at sun.reflect.GeneratedMethodAccessor20.invoke(Unknown Source) at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.java:25) at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:597) at org.apache.hadoop.hbase.ipc.HBaseRPC$Server.call(HBaseRPC.java:560) at org.apache.hadoop.hbase.ipc.HBaseServer$Handler.run(HBaseServer.java:1027)
A thread that receives data from HDFS:
"IPC Client (47) connection to sv4borg9/10.4.24.40:9000 from hadoop" daemon prio=10 tid=0x00007f16a02d0000 nid=0x4fa3 runnable [0x00007f16b517d000..0x00007f16b517dbf0] java.lang.Thread.State: RUNNABLE at sun.nio.ch.EPollArrayWrapper.epollWait(Native Method) at sun.nio.ch.EPollArrayWrapper.poll(EPollArrayWrapper.java:215) at sun.nio.ch.EPollSelectorImpl.doSelect(EPollSelectorImpl.java:65) at sun.nio.ch.SelectorImpl.lockAndDoSelect(SelectorImpl.java:69) - locked <0x00007f17d5b68c00> (a sun.nio.ch.Util$1) - locked <0x00007f17d5b68be8> (a java.util.Collections$UnmodifiableSet) - locked <0x00007f1877959b50> (a sun.nio.ch.EPollSelectorImpl) at sun.nio.ch.SelectorImpl.select(SelectorImpl.java:80) at org.apache.hadoop.net.SocketIOWithTimeout$SelectorPool.select(SocketIOWithTimeout.java:332) at org.apache.hadoop.net.SocketIOWithTimeout.doIO(SocketIOWithTimeout.java:157) at org.apache.hadoop.net.SocketInputStream.read(SocketInputStream.java:155) at org.apache.hadoop.net.SocketInputStream.read(SocketInputStream.java:128) at java.io.FilterInputStream.read(FilterInputStream.java:116) at org.apache.hadoop.ipc.Client$Connection$PingInputStream.read(Client.java:304) at java.io.BufferedInputStream.fill(BufferedInputStream.java:218) at java.io.BufferedInputStream.read(BufferedInputStream.java:237) - locked <0x00007f1808539178> (a java.io.BufferedInputStream) at java.io.DataInputStream.readInt(DataInputStream.java:370) at org.apache.hadoop.ipc.Client$Connection.receiveResponse(Client.java:569) at org.apache.hadoop.ipc.Client$Connection.run(Client.java:477)
And here is a master trying to recover a lease after a RegionServer died:
"LeaseChecker" daemon prio=10 tid=0x00000000407ef800 nid=0x76cd waiting on condition [0x00007f6d0eae2000..0x00007f6d0eae2a70] -- java.lang.Thread.State: WAITING (on object monitor) at java.lang.Object.wait(Native Method) at java.lang.Object.wait(Object.java:485) at org.apache.hadoop.ipc.Client.call(Client.java:726) - locked <0x00007f6d1cd28f80> (a org.apache.hadoop.ipc.Client$Call) at org.apache.hadoop.ipc.RPC$Invoker.invoke(RPC.java:220) at $Proxy1.recoverBlock(Unknown Source) at org.apache.hadoop.hdfs.DFSClient$DFSOutputStream.processDatanodeError(DFSClient.java:2636) at org.apache.hadoop.hdfs.DFSClient$DFSOutputStream.<init>(DFSClient.java:2832) at org.apache.hadoop.hdfs.DFSClient.append(DFSClient.java:529) at org.apache.hadoop.hdfs.DistributedFileSystem.append(DistributedFileSystem.java:186) at org.apache.hadoop.fs.FileSystem.append(FileSystem.java:530) at org.apache.hadoop.hbase.util.FSUtils.recoverFileLease(FSUtils.java:619) at org.apache.hadoop.hbase.regionserver.wal.HLog.splitLog(HLog.java:1322) at org.apache.hadoop.hbase.regionserver.wal.HLog.splitLog(HLog.java:1210) at org.apache.hadoop.hbase.master.HMaster.splitLogAfterStartup(HMaster.java:648) at org.apache.hadoop.hbase.master.HMaster.joinCluster(HMaster.java:572) at org.apache.hadoop.hbase.master.HMaster.run(HMaster.java:503)
OpenTSDB is an excellent alternative to Ganglia as it uses Apache HBase to store all the time series and doesn't have to downsample. Monitoring your own HBase cluster that hosts OpenTSDB is a good exercise.
Here's an example of a cluster that's suffering from hundreds of compactions launched almost all around the same time, which severely affects the IO performance: (TODO: insert graph plotting compactionQueueSize)
It's a good practice to build dashboards with all the important graphs per machine and per cluster so that debugging issues can be done with a single quick look. For example, at StumbleUpon there's one dashboard per cluster with the most important metrics from both the OS and Apache HBase. You can then go down at the machine level and get even more detailed metrics.
clusterssh+top, it's like a poor man's monitoring system and it can be quite useful when you have only a few machines as it's very easy to setup. Starting clusterssh will give you one terminal per machine and another terminal in which whatever you type will be retyped in every window. This means that you can type "top" once and it will start it for all of your machines at the same time giving you full view of the current state of your cluster. You can also tail all the logs at the same time, edit files, etc.
For more information on the HBase client, see Section 9.3, "Client".
This is thrown if the time between RPC calls from the client to RegionServer exceeds the scan timeout.
For example, if
Scan.setCaching is set to 500, then there will be an RPC call to fetch the next batch of rows every 500
.next() calls on the ResultScanner
because data is being transferred in blocks of 500 rows to the client. Reducing the setCaching value may be an option, but setting this value too low makes for inefficient
processing on numbers of rows.
In some situations clients that fetch data from a RegionServer get a LeaseException instead of the usual
Section 12.5.1, "ScannerTimeoutException or UnknownScannerException". Usually the source of the exception is
org.apache.hadoop.hbase.regionserver.Leases.removeLease(Leases.java:230) (line number may vary).
It tends to happen in the context of a slow/freezing RegionServer#next call.
It can be prevented by having
hbase.rpc.timeout >
Harsh J investigated the issue as part of the mailing list thread
HBase, mail # user - Lease does not exist exceptions
Since 0.20.0 the default log level for
org.apache.hadoop.hbase.*is DEBUG.
On your clients, edit
$HBASE_HOME/conf/log4j.properties and change this:
log4j.logger.org.apache.hadoop.hbase=DEBUG to this:
log4j.logger.org.apache.hadoop.hbase=INFO, or even
This is a fairly frequent question on the Apache HBase dist-list. The scenario is that a client is typically inserting a lot of data into a relatively un-optimized HBase cluster. Compression can exacerbate the pauses, although it is not the source of the problem.
See Section 11.7.2, " Table Creation: Pre-Creating Regions " on the pattern for pre-creating regions and confirm that the table isn't starting with a single region.
See Section 11.4, "HBase Configurations" for cluster configuration, particularly
MAX_FILESIZE (region size), and
A slightly longer explanation of why pauses can happen is as follows: Puts are sometimes blocked on the MemStores which are blocked by the flusher thread which is blocked because there are too many files to compact because the compactor is given too many small files to compact and has to compact the same data repeatedly. This situation can occur even with minor compactions. Compounding this situation, Apache HBase doesn't compress data in memory. Thus, the 64MB that lives in the MemStore could become a 6MB file after compression - which results in a smaller StoreFile. The upside is that more data is packed into the same region, but performance is achieved by being able to write larger files - which is why HBase waits until the flushize before writing a new StoreFile. And smaller StoreFiles become targets for compaction. Without compression the files are much bigger and don't need as much compaction, however this is at the expense of I/O.
For additional information, see this thread on Long client pauses with compression.
Errors like this...
11/07/05 11:26:41 WARN zookeeper.ClientCnxn: Session 0x0 for server null, unexpected error, closing socket connection and attempting reconnect java.net.ConnectException: Connection refused: no further information at sun.nio.ch.SocketChannelImpl.checkConnect(Native Method) at sun.nio.ch.SocketChannelImpl.finishConnect(Unknown Source) at org.apache.zookeeper.ClientCnxn$SendThread.run(ClientCnxn.java:1078) 11/07/05 11:26:43 INFO zookeeper.ClientCnxn: Opening socket connection to server localhost/127.0.0.1:2181 11/07/05 11:26:44 WARN zookeeper.ClientCnxn: Session 0x0 for server null, unexpected error, closing socket connection and attempting reconnect java.net.ConnectException: Connection refused: no further information at sun.nio.ch.SocketChannelImpl.checkConnect(Native Method) at sun.nio.ch.SocketChannelImpl.finishConnect(Unknown Source) at org.apache.zookeeper.ClientCnxn$SendThread.run(ClientCnxn.java:1078) 11/07/05 11:26:45 INFO zookeeper.ClientCnxn: Opening socket connection to server localhost/127.0.0.1:2181
... are either due to ZooKeeper being down, or unreachable due to network issues.
The utility Section 188.8.131.52, "zkcli" may help investigate ZooKeeper issues.
You are likely running into the issue that is described and worked through in
the mail thread HBase, mail # user - Suspected memory leak
and continued over in HBase, mail # dev - FeedbackRe: Suspected memory leak.
A workaround is passing your client-side JVM a reasonable value for
-XX:MaxDirectMemorySize. By default,
MaxDirectMemorySize is equal to your
-Xmx max heapsize setting (if
-Xmx is set).
Try seting it to something smaller (for example, one user had success setting it to
1g when
they had a client-side heap of
12g). If you set it too small, it will bring on
FullGCs so keep
it a bit hefty. You want to make this setting client-side only especially if you are running the new experiemental
server-side off-heap cache since this feature depends on being able to use big direct buffers (You may have to keep
separate client-side and server-side config dirs).
This is a client issue fixed by HBASE-5073 in 0.90.6. There was a ZooKeeper leak in the client and the client was getting pummeled by ZooKeeper events with each additional invocation of the admin API.
There can be several causes that produce this symptom.
First, check that you have a valid Kerberos ticket. One is required in order to set up communication with a secure Apache HBase cluster. Examine the ticket currently in the credential cache, if any, by running the klist command line utility. If no ticket is listed, you must obtain a ticket by running the kinit command with either a keytab specified, or by interactively entering a password for the desired principal.
Then, consult the Java Security Guide troubleshooting section. The most common problem addressed there is resolved by setting javax.security.auth.useSubjectCredsOnly system property value to false.
Because of a change in the format in which MIT Kerberos writes its credentials cache, there is a bug in the Oracle JDK 6 Update 26 and earlier that causes Java to be unable to read the Kerberos credentials cache created by versions of MIT Kerberos 1.8.1 or higher. If you have this problematic combination of components in your environment, to work around this problem, first log in with kinit and then immediately refresh the credential cache with kinit -R. The refresh will rewrite the credential cache without the problematic formatting.
Finally, depending on your Kerberos configuration, you may need to install the Java Cryptography Extension, or JCE. Insure the JCE jars are on the classpath on both server and client systems.
You may also need to download the unlimited strength JCE policy files. Uncompress and extract the downloaded file, and install the policy jars into <java-home>/lib/security.
This following stacktrace happened using
ImportTsv, but things like this
can happen on any job with a mis-configuration.
WARN mapred.LocalJobRunner: job_local_0001 java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Can't read partitions file at org.apache.hadoop.hbase.mapreduce.hadoopbackport.TotalOrderPartitioner.setConf(TotalOrderPartitioner.java:111) at org.apache.hadoop.util.ReflectionUtils.setConf(ReflectionUtils.java:62) at org.apache.hadoop.util.ReflectionUtils.newInstance(ReflectionUtils.java:117) at org.apache.hadoop.mapred.MapTask$NewOutputCollector.<init>(MapTask.java:560) at org.apache.hadoop.mapred.MapTask.runNewMapper(MapTask.java:639) at org.apache.hadoop.mapred.MapTask.run(MapTask.java:323) at org.apache.hadoop.mapred.LocalJobRunner$Job.run(LocalJobRunner.java:210) Caused by: java.io.FileNotFoundException: File _partition.lst does not exist. at org.apache.hadoop.fs.RawLocalFileSystem.getFileStatus(RawLocalFileSystem.java:383) at org.apache.hadoop.fs.FilterFileSystem.getFileStatus(FilterFileSystem.java:251) at org.apache.hadoop.fs.FileSystem.getLength(FileSystem.java:776) at org.apache.hadoop.io.SequenceFile$Reader.<init>(SequenceFile.java:1424) at org.apache.hadoop.io.SequenceFile$Reader.<init>(SequenceFile.java:1419) at org.apache.hadoop.hbase.mapreduce.hadoopbackport.TotalOrderPartitioner.readPartitions(TotalOrderPartitioner.java:296)
.. see the critical portion of the stack? It's...
at org.apache.hadoop.mapred.LocalJobRunner$Job.run(LocalJobRunner.java:210)
LocalJobRunner means the job is running locally, not on the cluster.
See http://hbase.apache.org/apidocs/org/apache/hadoop/hbase/mapreduce/package-summary.html#classpath for more information on HBase MapReduce jobs and classpaths.
For more information on the NameNode, see Section 9.9, "HDFS".
To determine how much space HBase is using on HDFS use the
hadoop shell commands from the NameNode. For example...
hadoop fs -dus /hbase/
...returns the summarized disk utilization for all HBase objects.
hadoop fs -dus /hbase/myTable
...returns the summarized disk utilization for the HBase table 'myTable'.
hadoop fs -du /hbase/myTable
...returns a list of the regions under the HBase table 'myTable' and their disk utilization.
For more information on HDFS shell commands, see the HDFS FileSystem Shell documentation.
Somtimes it will be necessary to explore the HBase objects that exist on HDFS. These objects could include the WALs (Write Ahead Logs), tables, regions, StoreFiles, etc. The easiest way to do this is with the NameNode web application that runs on port 50070. The NameNode web application will provide links to the all the DataNodes in the cluster so that they can be browsed seamlessly.
The HDFS directory structure of HBase tables in the cluster is...
/<Table>(Tables in the cluster)
/<Region>(Regions for the table)
/<ColumnFamiy>(ColumnFamilies for the Region for the table)
/<StoreFile>(StoreFiles for the ColumnFamily for the Regions for the table)
The HDFS directory structure of HBase WAL is..
/<HLog>(WAL HLog files for the RegionServer)
See the HDFS User Guide for other non-shell diagnostic
utilities like
Two common use-cases for querying HDFS for HBase objects is research the degree of uncompaction of a table. If there are a large number of StoreFiles for each ColumnFamily it could indicate the need for a major compaction. Additionally, after a major compaction if the resulting StoreFile is "small" it could indicate the need for a reduction of ColumnFamilies for the table.
If you are seeing periodic network spikes you might want to check the
compactionQueues to see if major
compactions are happening.
See Section 18.104.22.168, "Managed Compactions" for more information on managing compactions.
HBase expects the loopback IP Address to be 127.0.0.1. See the Getting Started section on Section 126.96.36.199, "Loopback IP".
Are all the network interfaces functioning correctly? Are you sure? See the Troubleshooting Case Study in Section 12.14, "Case Studies".
For more information on the RegionServers, see Section 9.6, "RegionServer".
The Master believes the RegionServers have the IP of 127.0.0.1 - which is localhost and resolves to the master's own localhost.
The RegionServers are erroneously informing the Master that their IP addresses are 127.0.0.1.
/etc/hosts on the region servers, from...
# Do not remove the following line, or various programs # that require network functionality will fail. 127.0.0.1 fully.qualified.regionservername regionservername localhost.localdomain localhost ::1 localhost6.localdomain6 localhost6
... to (removing the master node's name from localhost)...
# Do not remove the following line, or various programs # that require network functionality will fail. 127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost ::1 localhost6.localdomain6 localhost6
Since compression algorithms such as LZO need to be installed and configured on each cluster this is a frequent source of startup error. If you see messages like this...
11/02/20 01:32:15 ERROR lzo.GPLNativeCodeLoader: Could not load native gpl library java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError: no gplcompression in java.library.path at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadLibrary(ClassLoader.java:1734) at java.lang.Runtime.loadLibrary0(Runtime.java:823) at java.lang.System.loadLibrary(System.java:1028)
.. then there is a path issue with the compression libraries. See the Configuration section on LZO compression configuration.
Are you running an old JVM (< 1.6.0_u21?)? When you look at a thread dump,
does it look like threads are BLOCKED but no one holds the lock all are
blocked on? See HBASE 3622 Deadlock in HBaseServer (JVM bug?).
-XX:+UseMembar to the HBase
HBASE_OPTS in
may fix it.
Also, are you using Section 9.3.4, "RowLocks"? These are discouraged because they can lock up the RegionServers if not managed properly.
If you see log messages like this...
2010-09-13 01:24:17,336 WARN org.apache.hadoop.hdfs.server.datanode.DataNode: Disk-related IOException in BlockReceiver constructor. Cause is java.io.IOException: Too many open files at java.io.UnixFileSystem.createFileExclusively(Native Method) at java.io.File.createNewFile(File.java:883)
... see the Getting Started section on ulimit and nproc configuration.
This typically shows up in the DataNode logs.
See the Getting Started section on xceivers configuration.
See the Getting Started section on ulimit and nproc configuration. The default on recent Linux distributions is 1024 - which is far too low for HBase.
If you see warning messages like this...
2009-02-24 10:01:33,516 WARN org.apache.hadoop.hbase.util.Sleeper: We slept xxx ms, ten times longer than scheduled: 10000 2009-02-24 10:01:33,516 WARN org.apache.hadoop.hbase.util.Sleeper: We slept xxx ms, ten times longer than scheduled: 15000 2009-02-24 10:01:36,472 WARN org.apache.hadoop.hbase.regionserver.HRegionServer: unable to report to master for xxx milliseconds - retrying
... or see full GC compactions then you may be experiencing full GC's.
These errors can happen either when running out of OS file handles or in periods of severe network problems where the nodes are unreachable.
See the Getting Started section on ulimit and nproc configuration and check your network.
Master or RegionServers shutting down with messages like those in the logs:
WARN org.apache.zookeeper.ClientCnxn: Exception closing session 0x278bd16a96000f to sun.nio.ch.SelectionKeyImpl@355811ec java.io.IOException: TIMED OUT at org.apache.zookeeper.ClientCnxn$SendThread.run(ClientCnxn.java:906) WARN org.apache.hadoop.hbase.util.Sleeper: We slept 79410ms, ten times longer than scheduled: 5000 INFO org.apache.zookeeper.ClientCnxn: Attempting connection to server hostname/IP:PORT INFO org.apache.zookeeper.ClientCnxn: Priming connection to java.nio.channels.SocketChannel[connected local=/IP:PORT remote=hostname/IP:PORT] INFO org.apache.zookeeper.ClientCnxn: Server connection successful WARN org.apache.zookeeper.ClientCnxn: Exception closing session 0x278bd16a96000d to sun.nio.ch.SelectionKeyImpl@3544d65e java.io.IOException: Session Expired at org.apache.zookeeper.ClientCnxn$SendThread.readConnectResult(ClientCnxn.java:589) at org.apache.zookeeper.ClientCnxn$SendThread.doIO(ClientCnxn.java:709) at org.apache.zookeeper.ClientCnxn$SendThread.run(ClientCnxn.java:945) ERROR org.apache.hadoop.hbase.regionserver.HRegionServer: ZooKeeper session expired
The JVM is doing a long running garbage collecting which is pausing every threads (aka "stop the world"). Since the RegionServer's local ZooKeeper client cannot send heartbeats, the session times out. By design, we shut down any node that isn't able to contact the ZooKeeper ensemble after getting a timeout so that it stops serving data that may already be assigned elsewhere.
hbase-env.sh), the default of 1GB won't be able to sustain long running imports.
If you wish to increase the session timeout, add the following to your
hbase-site.xml to increase the timeout from the default of 60 seconds to 120 seconds.
<property> <name>zookeeper.session.timeout</name> <value>1200000</value> </property> <property> <name>hbase.zookeeper.property.tickTime</name> <value>6000</value> </property>
Be aware that setting a higher timeout means that the regions served by a failed RegionServer will take at least that amount of time to be transfered to another RegionServer. For a production system serving live requests, we would instead recommend setting it lower than 1 minute and over-provision your cluster in order the lower the memory load on each machines (hence having less garbage to collect per machine).
If this is happening during an upload which only happens once (like initially loading all your data into HBase), consider bulk loading.See Section 12.11.2, "ZooKeeper, The Cluster Canary" for other general information about ZooKeeper troubleshooting.
This exception is "normal" when found in the RegionServer logs at DEBUG level. This exception is returned back to the client and then the client goes back to .META. to find the new location of the moved region.
However, if the NotServingRegionException is logged ERROR, then the client ran out of retries and something probably wrong.
Fix your DNS. In versions of Apache HBase before 0.92.x, reverse DNS needs to give same answer as forward lookup. See HBASE 3431 RegionServer is not using the name given it by the master; double entry in master listing of servers for gorey details.
We are not using the native versions of compression libraries. See HBASE-1900 Put back native support when hadoop 0.21 is released. Copy the native libs from hadoop under hbase lib dir or symlink them into place and the message should go away.
If you see this type of message it means that the region server was trying to read/send data from/to a client but it already went away. Typical causes for this are if the client was killed (you see a storm of messages like this when a MapReduce job is killed or fails) or if the client receives a SocketTimeoutException. It's harmless, but you should consider digging in a bit more if you aren't doing something to trigger them.
For more information on the Master, see Section 9.5, "Master".
Upon running that, the hbase migrations script says no files in root directory.
HBase expects the root directory to either not exist, or to have already been initialized by hbase running a previous time. If you create a new directory for HBase using Hadoop DFS, this error will occur. Make sure the HBase root directory does not currently exist or has been initialized by a previous run of HBase. Sure fire solution is to just use Hadoop dfs to delete the HBase root and let HBase create and initialize the directory itself.
If you have many regions on your cluster and you see an error like that reported above in this sections title in your logs, see HBASE-4246 Cluster with too many regions cannot withstand some master failover scenarios.
A ZooKeeper server wasn't able to start, throws that error. xyz is the name of your server.
This is a name lookup problem. HBase tries to start a ZooKeeper server on some machine but that machine isn't able to find itself in the
hbase.zookeeper.quorum configuration.
Use the hostname presented in the error message instead of the value you used. If you have a DNS server, you can set
hbase.zookeeper.dns.interface and
hbase.zookeeper.dns.nameserver in
hbase-site.xml to make sure it resolves to the correct FQDN.
ZooKeeper is the cluster's "canary in the mineshaft". It'll be the first to notice issues if any so making sure its happy is the short-cut to a humming cluster.
See the ZooKeeper Operating Environment Troubleshooting page. It has suggestions and tools for checking disk and networking performance; i.e. the operating environment your ZooKeeper and HBase are running in.
Additionally, the utility Section 184.108.40.206, "zkcli" may help investigate ZooKeeper issues.
HBase does not start when deployed as Amazon EC2 instances. Exceptions like the below appear in the Master and/or RegionServer logs:
2009-10-19 11:52:27,030 INFO org.apache.zookeeper.ClientCnxn: Attempting connection to server ec2-174-129-15-236.compute-1.amazonaws.com/10.244.9.171:2181 2009-10-19 11:52:27,032 WARN org.apache.zookeeper.ClientCnxn: Exception closing session 0x0 to sun.nio.ch.SelectionKeyImpl@656dc861 java.net.ConnectException: Connection refused
Security group policy is blocking the ZooKeeper port on a public address. Use the internal EC2 host names when configuring the ZooKeeper quorum peer list.
Questions on HBase and Amazon EC2 come up frequently on the HBase dist-list. Search for old threads using Search Hadoop
See Andrew's answer here, up on the user list: Remote Java client connection into EC2 instance.
Apache HBase 0.90.x does not ship with hadoop-0.20.205.x, etc. To make it run, you need to replace the hadoop
jars that Apache HBase shipped with in its
lib directory with those of the Hadoop you want to
run HBase on. If even after replacing Hadoop jars you get the below exception:
sv4r6s38: Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: org/apache/commons/configuration/Configuration sv4r6s38: at org.apache.hadoop.metrics2.lib.DefaultMetricsSystem.<init>(DefaultMetricsSystem.java:37) sv4r6s38: at org.apache.hadoop.metrics2.lib.DefaultMetricsSystem.<clinit>(DefaultMetricsSystem.java:34) sv4r6s38: at org.apache.hadoop.security.UgiInstrumentation.create(UgiInstrumentation.java:51) sv4r6s38: at org.apache.hadoop.security.UserGroupInformation.initialize(UserGroupInformation.java:209) sv4r6s38: at org.apache.hadoop.security.UserGroupInformation.ensureInitialized(UserGroupInformation.java:177) sv4r6s38: at org.apache.hadoop.security.UserGroupInformation.isSecurityEnabled(UserGroupInformation.java:229) sv4r6s38: at org.apache.hadoop.security.KerberosName.<clinit>(KerberosName.java:83) sv4r6s38: at org.apache.hadoop.security.UserGroupInformation.initialize(UserGroupInformation.java:202) sv4r6s38: at org.apache.hadoop.security.UserGroupInformation.ensureInitialized(UserGroupInformation.java:177)
you need to copy under
hbase/lib, the
commons-configuration-X.jar you find
in your Hadoop's
lib directory. That should fix the above complaint.
If you see something like the following in your logs
2012-09-24 10:20:52,168 FATAL org.apache.hadoop.hbase.master.HMaster: Unhandled exception. Starting shutdown.
org.apache.hadoop.ipc.RemoteException: Server IPC version 7 cannot communicate with client version 4
...are you trying to talk to an Hadoop 2.0.x from an HBase that has an Hadoop 1.0.x client?
Use the HBase built against Hadoop 2.0 or rebuild your HBase passing the -Dhadoop.profile=2.0
attribute to Maven (See Section 15.8.3, "Building against various hadoop versions." for more).
For Performance and Troubleshooting Case Studies, see Chapter 13, Apache HBase (TM) Case Studies.
[28] See Getting Answers
Table of Contents
This chapter will describe a variety of performance and troubleshooting case studies that can provide a useful blueprint on diagnosing Apache HBase (TM) cluster issues.
For more information on Performance and Troubleshooting, see Chapter 11, Apache HBase (TM) Performance Tuning and Chapter 12, Troubleshooting and Debugging Apache HBase (TM).
The following is an exchange from the user dist-list regarding a fairly common question: how to handle per-user list data in Apache HBase.
We're looking at how to store a large amount of (per-user) list data in HBase, and we were trying to figure out what kind of access pattern made the most sense. One option is store the majority of the data in a key, so we could have something like:
<FixedWidthUserName><FixedWidthValueId1>:"" (no value) <FixedWidthUserName><FixedWidthValueId2>:"" (no value) <FixedWidthUserName><FixedWidthValueId3>:"" (no value)The other option we had was to do this entirely using:
<FixedWidthUserName><FixedWidthPageNum0>:<FixedWidthLength><FixedIdNextPageNum><ValueId1><ValueId2><ValueId3>... <FixedWidthUserName><FixedWidthPageNum1>:<FixedWidthLength><FixedIdNextPageNum><ValueId1><ValueId2><ValueId3>...
where each row would contain multiple values. So in one case reading the first thirty values would be:
scan { STARTROW => 'FixedWidthUsername' LIMIT => 30}And in the second case it would be
get 'FixedWidthUserName\x00\x00\x00\x00'
The general usage pattern would be to read only the first 30 values of these lists, with infrequent access reading deeper into the lists. Some users would have <= 30 total values in these lists, and some users would have millions (i.e. power-law distribution)
The single-value format seems like it would take up more space on HBase, but would offer some improved retrieval / pagination flexibility. Would there be any significant performance advantages to be able to paginate via gets vs paginating with scans?
My initial understanding was that doing a scan should be faster if our paging size is unknown (and caching is set appropriately), but that gets should be faster if we'll always need the same page size. I've ended up hearing different people tell me opposite things about performance. I assume the page sizes would be relatively consistent, so for most use cases we could guarantee that we only wanted one page of data in the fixed-page-length case. I would also assume that we would have infrequent updates, but may have inserts into the middle of these lists (meaning we'd need to update all subsequent rows).
Thanks for help / suggestions / follow-up questions.
If I understand you correctly, you're ultimately trying to store triples in the form "user, valueid, value", right? E.g., something like:
"user123, firstname, Paul", "user234, lastname, Smith"
(But the usernames are fixed width, and the valueids are fixed width).
And, your access pattern is along the lines of: "for user X, list the next 30 values, starting with valueid Y". Is that right? And these values should be returned sorted by valueid?
The tl;dr version is that you should probably go with one row per user+value, and not build a complicated intra-row pagination scheme on your own unless you're really sure it is needed.
Your two options mirror a common question people have when designing HBase schemas: should I go "tall" or "wide"? Your first schema is "tall": each row represents one value for one user, and so there are many rows in the table for each user; the row key is user + valueid, and there would be (presumably) a single column qualifier that means "the value". This is great if you want to scan over rows in sorted order by row key (thus my question above, about whether these ids are sorted correctly). You can start a scan at any user+valueid, read the next 30, and be done. What you're giving up is the ability to have transactional guarantees around all the rows for one user, but it doesn't sound like you need that. Doing it this way is generally recommended (see here http://hbase.apache.org/book.html#schema.smackdown).
Your second option is "wide": you store a bunch of values in one row, using different qualifiers (where the qualifier is the valueid). The simple way to do that would be to just store ALL values for one user in a single row. I'm guessing you jumped to the "paginated" version because you're assuming that storing millions of columns in a single row would be bad for performance, which may or may not be true; as long as you're not trying to do too much in a single request, or do things like scanning over and returning all of the cells in the row, it shouldn't be fundamentally worse. The client has methods that allow you to get specific slices of columns.
Note that neither case fundamentally uses more disk space than the other; you're just "shifting" part of the identifying information for a value either to the left (into the row key, in option one) or to the right (into the column qualifiers in option 2). Under the covers, every key/value still stores the whole row key, and column family name. (If this is a bit confusing, take an hour and watch Lars George's excellent video about understanding HBase schema design: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_HLoH_PgrLk).
A manually paginated version has lots more complexities, as you note, like having to keep track of how many things are in each page, re-shuffling if new values are inserted, etc. That seems significantly more complex. It might have some slight speed advantages (or disadvantages!) at extremely high throughput, and the only way to really know that would be to try it out. If you don't have time to build it both ways and compare, my advice would be to start with the simplest option (one row per user+value). Start simple and iterate! :)
Following a scheduled reboot, one data node began exhibiting unusual behavior. Routine MapReduce jobs run against HBase tables which regularly completed in five or six minutes began taking 30 or 40 minutes to finish. These jobs were consistently found to be waiting on map and reduce tasks assigned to the troubled data node (e.g., the slow map tasks all had the same Input Split). The situation came to a head during a distributed copy, when the copy was severely prolonged by the lagging node.
We hypothesized that we were experiencing a familiar point of pain: a "hot spot" region in an HBase table, where uneven key-space distribution can funnel a huge number of requests to a single HBase region, bombarding the RegionServer process and cause slow response time. Examination of the HBase Master status page showed that the number of HBase requests to the troubled node was almost zero. Further, examination of the HBase logs showed that there were no region splits, compactions, or other region transitions in progress. This effectively ruled out a "hot spot" as the root cause of the observed slowness.
Our next hypothesis was that one of the MapReduce tasks was requesting data from HBase that was not local to the datanode, thus forcing HDFS to request data blocks from other servers over the network. Examination of the datanode logs showed that there were very few blocks being requested over the network, indicating that the HBase region was correctly assigned, and that the majority of the necessary data was located on the node. This ruled out the possibility of non-local data causing a slowdown.
After concluding that the Hadoop and HBase were not likely to be the culprits, we moved on to troubleshooting the datanode's hardware.
Java, by design, will periodically scan its entire memory space to do garbage collection. If system memory is heavily overcommitted, the Linux
kernel may enter a vicious cycle, using up all of its resources swapping Java heap back and forth from disk to RAM as Java tries to run garbage
collection. Further, a failing hard disk will often retry reads and/or writes many times before giving up and returning an error. This can manifest
as high iowait, as running processes wait for reads and writes to complete. Finally, a disk nearing the upper edge of its performance envelope will
begin to cause iowait as it informs the kernel that it cannot accept any more data, and the kernel queues incoming data into the dirty write pool in memory.
However, using
vmstat(1) and
free(1), we could see that no swap was being used, and the amount of disk IO was only a few kilobytes per second.
Next, we checked to see whether the system was performing slowly simply due to very high computational load.
top(1) showed that the system load
was higher than normal, but
vmstat(1) and
mpstat(1) showed that the amount of processor being used for actual computation was low.
Since neither the disks nor the processors were being utilized heavily, we moved on to the performance of the network interfaces. The datanode had two
gigabit ethernet adapters, bonded to form an active-standby interface.
ifconfig(8) showed some unusual anomalies, namely interface errors, overruns, framing errors.
While not unheard of, these kinds of errors are exceedingly rare on modern hardware which is operating as it should:
$ /sbin/ifconfig bond0 bond0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:00:00:00:00:00 inet addr:10.x.x.x Bcast:10.x.x.255 Mask:255.255.255.0 UP BROADCAST RUNNING MASTER MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:2990700159 errors:12 dropped:0 overruns:1 frame:6 <--- Look Here! Errors! TX packets:3443518196 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:0 RX bytes:2416328868676 (2.4 TB) TX bytes:3464991094001 (3.4 TB)
These errors immediately lead us to suspect that one or more of the ethernet interfaces might have negotiated the wrong line speed. This was confirmed both by running an ICMP ping
from an external host and observing round-trip-time in excess of 700ms, and by running
ethtool(8) on the members of the bond interface and discovering that the active interface
was operating at 100Mbs/, full duplex.
$ sudo ethtool eth0 Settings for eth0: Supported ports: [ TP ] Supported link modes: 10baseT/Half 10baseT/Full 100baseT/Half 100baseT/Full 1000baseT/Full Supports auto-negotiation: Yes Advertised link modes: 10baseT/Half 10baseT/Full 100baseT/Half 100baseT/Full 1000baseT/Full Advertised pause frame use: No Advertised auto-negotiation: Yes Link partner advertised link modes: Not reported Link partner advertised pause frame use: No Link partner advertised auto-negotiation: No Speed: 100Mb/s <--- Look Here! Should say 1000Mb/s! Duplex: Full Port: Twisted Pair PHYAD: 1 Transceiver: internal Auto-negotiation: on MDI-X: Unknown Supports Wake-on: umbg Wake-on: g Current message level: 0x00000003 (3) Link detected: yes
In normal operation, the ICMP ping round trip time should be around 20ms, and the interface speed and duplex should read, "1000MB/s", and, "Full", respectively.
After determining that the active ethernet adapter was at the incorrect speed, we used the
ifenslave(8) command to make the standby interface
the active interface, which yielded an immediate improvement in MapReduce performance, and a 10 times improvement in network throughput:
On the next trip to the datacenter, we determined that the line speed issue was ultimately caused by a bad network cable, which was replaced.
Investigation results of a self-described "we're not sure what's wrong, but it seems slow" problem. http://gbif.blogspot.com/2012/03/hbase-performance-evaluation-continued.html
Investigation results of general cluster performance from 2010. Although this research is on an older version of the codebase, this writeup is still very useful in terms of approach. http://hstack.org/hbase-performance-testing/
Case study of configuring
xceivers, and diagnosing errors from mis-configurations.
Table of Contents
Here we list HBase tools for administration, analysis, fixup, and debugging.
There is a
Driver class that is executed by the HBase jar can be used to invoke frequently accessed utilities. For example,
HADOOP_CLASSPATH=`${HBASE_HOME}/bin/hbase classpath` ${HADOOP_HOME}/bin/hadoop jar ${HBASE_HOME}/hbase-VERSION.jar
... will return...
An example program must be given as the first argument. Valid program names are: completebulkload: Complete a bulk data load. copytable: Export a table from local cluster to peer cluster export: Write table data to HDFS. import: Import data written by Export. importtsv: Import data in TSV format. rowcounter: Count rows in HBase table verifyrep: Compare the data from tables in two different clusters. WARNING: It doesn't work for incrementColumnValues'd cells since the timestamp is chan
... for allowable program names.
To run hbck against your HBase cluster run
$ ./bin/hbase hbck
At the end of the commands output it prints OK or INCONSISTENCY. If your cluster reports inconsistencies, pass -details to see more detail emitted. If inconsistencies, run hbck a few times because the inconsistency may be transient (e.g. cluster is starting up or a region is splitting). Passing -fix may correct the inconsistency (This latter is an experimental feature).
For more information, see Appendix B, hbck In Depth.
The main method on
HLog offers manual
split and dump facilities. Pass it WALs or the product of a split, the
content of the
recovered.edits. directory.
You can get a textual dump of a WAL file content by doing the following:
$ ./bin/hbase org.apache.hadoop.hbase.regionserver.wal.HLog --dump hdfs://example.org:8020/hbase/.logs/example.org,60020,1283516293161/10.10.21.10%3A60020.1283973724012
return code will be non-zero if issues with the file so you can test
wholesomeness of file by redirecting
STDOUT to
/dev/null and testing the program return.
Similarly you can force a split of a log file directory by doing:
$ ./
bin/hbase org.apache.hadoop.hbase.regionserver.wal.HLog --split hdfs://example.org:8020/hbase/.logs/example.org,60020,1283516293161/
CopyTable is a utility that can copy part or of all of a table, either to the same cluster or another cluster. The usage is as follows:
$ bin/hbase org.apache.hadoop.hbase.mapreduce.CopyTable [--starttime=X] [--endtime=Y] [--new.name=NEW] [--peer.adr=ADR] tablename
starttime Beginning of the time range. Without endtime means starttime to forever.
endtime End of the time range. Without endtime means starttime to forever.
versions Number of cell versions to copy.
new.name New table's name.
peer.adr Address of the peer cluster given in the format hbase.zookeeper.quorum:hbase.zookeeper.client.port:zookeeper.znode.parent
families Comma-separated list of ColumnFamilies to copy.
all.cells Also copy delete markers and uncollected deleted cells (advanced option).
Example of copying 'TestTable' to a cluster that uses replication for a 1 hour window:
$ bin/hbase org.apache.hadoop.hbase.mapreduce.CopyTable --starttime=1265875194289 --endtime=1265878794289 --peer.adr=server1,server2,server3:2181:/hbase TestTable
Caching for the input Scan is configured via
hbase.client.scanner.caching in the job configuration.
See Jonathan Hsieh's Online HBase Backups with CopyTable blog post for more on CopyTable.
Export is a utility that will dump the contents of table to HDFS in a sequence file. Invoke via:
$ bin/hbase org.apache.hadoop.hbase.mapreduce.Export <tablename> <outputdir> [<versions> [<starttime> [<endtime>]]]
Note: caching for the input Scan is configured via
hbase.client.scanner.caching in the job configuration.
Import is a utility that will load data that has been exported back into HBase. Invoke via:
$ bin/hbase org.apache.hadoop.hbase.mapreduce.Import <tablename> <inputdir>
ImportTsv is a utility that will load data in TSV format into HBase. It has two distinct usages: loading data from TSV format in HDFS
into HBase via Puts, and preparing StoreFiles to be loaded via the
To load data via Puts (i.e., non-bulk loading):
$ bin/hbase org.apache.hadoop.hbase.mapreduce.ImportTsv -Dimporttsv.columns=a,b,c <tablename> <hdfs-inputdir>
To generate StoreFiles for bulk-loading:
$ bin/hbase org.apache.hadoop.hbase.mapreduce.ImportTsv -Dimporttsv.columns=a,b,c -Dimporttsv.bulk.output=hdfs://storefile-outputdir <tablename> <hdfs-data-inputdir>
These generated StoreFiles can be loaded into HBase via Section 14.1.10, "CompleteBulkLoad".
Usage: importtsv -Dimporttsv.columns=a,b,c <tablename> <inputdir> Imports the given input directory of TSV data into the specified table. The column names of the TSV data must be specified using the -Dimporttsv.columns option. This option takes the form of comma-separated column names, where each column name is either a simple column family, or a columnfamily:qualifier. The special column name HBASE_ROW_KEY is used to designate that this column should be used as the row key for each imported record. You must specify exactly one column to be the row key, and you must specify a column name for every column that exists in the input data. By default importtsv will load data directly into HBase. To instead generate HFiles of data to prepare for a bulk data load, pass the option: -Dimporttsv.bulk.output=/path/for/output Note: the target table will be created with default column family descriptors if it does not already exist. Other options that may be specified with -D include: -Dimporttsv.skip.bad.lines=false - fail if encountering an invalid line '-Dimporttsv.separator=|' - eg separate on pipes instead of tabs -Dimporttsv.timestamp=currentTimeAsLong - use the specified timestamp for the import -Dimporttsv.mapper.class=my.Mapper - A user-defined Mapper to use instead of org.apache.hadoop.hbase.mapreduce.TsvImporterMapper
For example, assume that we are loading data into a table called 'datatsv' with a ColumnFamily called 'd' with two columns "c1" and "c2".
Assume that an input file exists as follows:
row1 c1 c2 row2 c1 c2 row3 c1 c2 row4 c1 c2 row5 c1 c2 row6 c1 c2 row7 c1 c2 row8 c1 c2 row9 c1 c2 row10 c1 c2
For ImportTsv to use this imput file, the command line needs to look like this:
HADOOP_CLASSPATH=`${HBASE_HOME}/bin/hbase classpath` ${HADOOP_HOME}/bin/hadoop jar ${HBASE_HOME}/hbase-VERSION.jar importtsv -Dimporttsv.columns=HBASE_ROW_KEY,d:c1,d:c2 -Dimporttsv.bulk.output=hdfs://storefileoutput datatsv hdfs://inputfile
... and in this example the first column is the rowkey, which is why the HBASE_ROW_KEY is used. The second and third columns in the file will be imported as "d:c1" and "d:c2", respectively.
If you have preparing a lot of data for bulk loading, make sure the target HBase table is pre-split appropriately.
completebulkload utility will move generated StoreFiles into an HBase table. This utility is often used
in conjunction with output from Section 14.1.9, "ImportTsv".
There are two ways to invoke this utility, with explicit classname and via the driver:
$ bin/hbase org.apache.hadoop.hbase.mapreduce.LoadIncrementalHFiles <hdfs://storefileoutput> <tablename>
.. and via the Driver..
HADOOP_CLASSPATH=`${HBASE_HOME}/bin/hbase classpath` ${HADOOP_HOME}/bin/hadoop jar ${HBASE_HOME}/hbase-VERSION.jar completebulkload <hdfs://storefileoutput> <tablename>
Data generated via MapReduce is often created with file permissions that are not compatible with the running HBase process. Assuming you're running HDFS with permissions enabled, those permissions will need to be updated before you run CompleteBulkLoad.
For more information about bulk-loading HFiles into HBase, see Section 9.8, "Bulk Loading".
WALPlayer is a utility to replay WAL files into HBase.
The WAL can be replayed for a set of tables or all tables, and a timerange can be provided (in milliseconds). The WAL is filtered to this set of tables. The output can optionally be mapped to another set of tables.
WALPlayer can also generate HFiles for later bulk importing, in that case only a single table and no mapping can be specified.
Invoke via:
$ bin/hbase org.apache.hadoop.hbase.mapreduce.WALPlayer [options] <wal inputdir> <tables> [<tableMappings>]>
For example:
$ bin/hbase org.apache.hadoop.hbase.mapreduce.WALPlayer /backuplogdir oldTable1,oldTable2 newTable1,newTable2
WALPlayer, by default, runs as a mapreduce job. To NOT run WALPlayer as a mapreduce job on your cluster,
force it to run all in the local process by adding the flags
-Dmapred.job.tracker=local on the command line.
RowCounter is a mapreduce job to count all the rows of a table. This is a good utility to use as a sanity check to ensure that HBase can read all the blocks of a table if there are any concerns of metadata inconsistency. It will run the mapreduce all in a single process but it will run faster if you have a MapReduce cluster in place for it to exploit.
$ bin/hbase org.apache.hadoop.hbase.mapreduce.RowCounter <tablename> [<column1> <column2>...]
Note: caching for the input Scan is configured via
hbase.client.scanner.caching in the job configuration.
HBase ships another diagnostic mapreduce job called CellCounter. Like RowCounter, it gathers more fine-grained statistics about your table. The statistics gathered by RowCounter are more fine-grained and include:
The program allows you to limit the scope of the run. Provide a row regex or prefix to limit the rows to analyze. Use
hbase.mapreduce.scan.column.family to specify scanning a single column family.
$ bin/hbase org.apache.hadoop.hbase.mapreduce.CellCounter <tablename> <outputDir> [regex or prefix]
Note: just like RowCounter, caching for the input Scan is configured via
hbase.client.scanner.caching in the
job configuration.
Major compactions can be requested via the HBase shell or HBaseAdmin.majorCompact.
Note: major compactions do NOT do region merges. See Section 126.96.36.199, "Compaction" for more information about compactions.
Merge is a utility that can merge adjoining regions in the same table (see org.apache.hadoop.hbase.util.Merge).
$ bin/hbase org.apache.hbase.util.Merge <tablename> <region1> <region2>
If you feel you have too many regions and want to consolidate them, Merge is the utility you need. Merge must run be done when the cluster is down. See the O'Reilly HBase Book for an example of usage.
Additionally, there is a Ruby script attached to HBASE-1621 for region merging.
You can stop an individual RegionServer by running the following script in the HBase directory on the particular node:
$ ./bin/hbase-daemon.sh stop regionserver
The RegionServer will first close all regions and then shut itself down. On shutdown, the RegionServer's ephemeral node in ZooKeeper will expire. The master will notice the RegionServer gone and will treat it as a 'crashed' server; it will reassign the nodes the RegionServer was carrying.
If the load balancer runs while a node is shutting down, then there could be contention between the Load Balancer and the Master's recovery of the just decommissioned RegionServer. Avoid any problems by disabling the balancer first. See Load Balancer below.
A downside to the above stop of a RegionServer is that regions could be offline for
a good period of time. Regions are closed in order. If many regions on the server, the
first region to close may not be back online until all regions close and after the master
notices the RegionServer's znode gone. In Apache HBase 0.90.2, we added facility for having
a node gradually shed its load and then shutdown itself down. Apache HBase 0.90.2 added the
graceful_stop.sh script. Here is its usage:
$ ./bin/graceful_stop.sh Usage: graceful_stop.sh [--config &conf-dir>] [--restart] [--reload] [--thrift] [--rest] &hostname> thrift If we should stop/start thrift before/after the hbase stop/start rest If we should stop/start rest before/after the hbase stop/start restart If we should restart after graceful stop reload Move offloaded regions back on to the stopped server debug Move offloaded regions back on to the stopped server hostname Hostname of server we are to stop
To decommission a loaded RegionServer, run the following:
$ ./bin/graceful_stop.sh HOSTNAME
HOSTNAME is the host carrying the RegionServer
you would decommission.
HOSTNAME passed to
must match the hostname that hbase is using to identify RegionServers.
Check the list of RegionServers in the master UI for how HBase is
referring to servers. Its usually hostname but can also be FQDN.
Whatever HBase is using, this is what you should pass the
graceful_stop.sh decommission
script. If you pass IPs, the script is not yet smart enough to make
a hostname (or FQDN) of it and so it will fail when it checks if server is
currently running; the graceful unloading of regions will not run.
graceful_stop.sh script will move the regions off the
decommissioned RegionServer one at a time to minimize region churn.
It will verify the region deployed in the new location before it
will moves the next region and so on until the decommissioned server
is carrying zero regions. At this point, the
tells the RegionServer stop. The master will at this point notice the
RegionServer gone but all regions will have already been redeployed
and because the RegionServer went down cleanly, there will be no
WAL logs to split.
It is assumed that the Region Load Balancer is disabled while the graceful_stop script runs (otherwise the balancer and the decommission script will end up fighting over region deployments). Use the shell to disable the balancer:
hbase(main):001:0> balance_switch false true 0 row(s) in 0.3590 seconds
This turns the balancer OFF. To reenable, do:
hbase(main):001:0> balance_switch true false 0 row(s) in 0.3590 seconds
It is good having Section 220.127.116.11.1, "dfs.datanode.failed.volumes.tolerated" set if you have a decent number of disks
per machine for the case where a disk plain dies. But usually disks do the "John Wayne" -- i.e. take a while
to go down spewing errors in
dmesg -- or for some reason, run much slower than their
companions. In this case you want to decommission the disk. You have two options. You can
<xlink>decommission the datanode</xlink>
or, less disruptive in that only the bad disks data will be rereplicated, can stop the datanode,
unmount the bad volume (You can't umount a volume while the datanode is using it), and then restart the
datanode (presuming you have set dfs.datanode.failed.volumes.tolerated > 0). The regionserver will
throw some errors in its logs as it recalibrates where to get its data from -- it will likely
roll its WAL log too -- but in general but for some latency spikes, it should keep on chugging.
If you are doing short-circuit reads, you will have to move the regions off the regionserver before you stop the datanode; when short-circuiting reading, though chmod'd so regionserver cannot have access, because it already has the files open, it will be able to keep reading the file blocks from the bad disk even though the datanode is down. Move the regions back after you restart the datanode.
You can also ask this script to restart a RegionServer after the shutdown AND move its old regions back into place. The latter you might do to retain data locality. A primitive rolling restart might be effected by running something like the following:
$ for i in `cat conf/regionservers|sort`; do ./bin/graceful_stop.sh --restart --reload --debug $i; done &> /tmp/log.txt &
Tail the output of
/tmp/log.txt to follow the scripts
progress. The above does RegionServers only. Be sure to disable the
load balancer before doing the above. You'd need to do the master
update separately. Do it before you run the above script.
Here is a pseudo-script for how you might craft a rolling restart script:
Untar your release, make sure of its configuration and then rsync it across the cluster. If this is 0.90.2, patch it with HBASE-3744 and HBASE-3756.
Run hbck to ensure the cluster consistent
$ ./bin/hbase hbck
Effect repairs if inconsistent.
Restart the Master:
$ ./bin/hbase-daemon.sh stop master; ./bin/hbase-daemon.sh start master
Disable the region balancer:
$ echo "balance_switch false" | ./bin/hbase shell
Run the
graceful_stop.sh script per RegionServer. For example:
$ for i in `cat conf/regionservers|sort`; do ./bin/graceful_stop.sh --restart --reload --debug $i; done &> /tmp/log.txt &
If you are running thrift or rest servers on the RegionServer, pass --thrift or --rest options (See usage
graceful_stop.sh script).
Restart the Master again. This will clear out dead servers list and reenable the balancer.
Run hbck to ensure the cluster is consistent.
See Metrics for an introduction and how to enable Metrics emission.
Block cache item count in memory. This is the number of blocks of StoreFiles (HFiles) in the cache.
Number of blocks that had to be evicted from the block cache due to heap size constraints.
Block cache hit caching ratio (0 to 100). The cache-hit ratio for reads configured to look in the cache (i.e., cacheBlocks=true).
Number of blocks of StoreFiles (HFiles) read from the cache.
Block cache hit ratio (0 to 100). Includes all read requests, although those with cacheBlocks=false will always read from disk and be counted as a "cache miss".
Number of blocks of StoreFiles (HFiles) requested but not read from the cache.
Block cache size in memory (bytes). i.e., memory in use by the BlockCache
Size of the compaction queue. This is the number of Stores in the RegionServer that have been targeted for compaction.
Number of enqueued regions in the MemStore awaiting flush.
Filesystem read latency (ms). This is the average time to read from HDFS.
Filesystem sync latency (ms). Latency to sync the write-ahead log records to the filesystem.
Number of operations to sync the write-ahead log records to the filesystem.
Filesystem write latency (ms). Total latency for all writers, including StoreFiles and write-head log.
Number of filesystem write operations, including StoreFiles and write-ahead log.
Total number of read and write requests. Requests correspond to RegionServer RPC calls, thus a single Get will result in 1 request, but a Scan with caching set to 1000 will result in 1 request for each 'next' call (i.e., not each row). A bulk-load request will constitute 1 request per HFile.
Sum of all the StoreFile index sizes in this RegionServer (MB)
Number of Stores open on the RegionServer. A Store corresponds to a ColumnFamily. For example, if a table (which contains the column family) has 3 regions on a RegionServer, there will be 3 stores open for that column family.
The following metrics are arguably the most important to monitor for each RegionServer for "macro monitoring", preferably with a system like OpenTSDB. If your cluster is having performance issues it's likely that you'll see something unusual with this group.
For more information on HBase metrics, see Section 14.4, "HBase Metrics".
The HBase slow query log consists of parseable JSON structures describing the properties of those client operations (Gets, Puts, Deletes, etc.) that either took too long to run, or produced too much output. The thresholds for "too long to run" and "too much output" are configurable, as described below. The output is produced inline in the main region server logs so that it is easy to discover further details from context with other logged events. It is also prepended with identifying tags
(operationTooSlow), and
(operationTooLarge) in order to enable easy filtering with grep, in case the user desires to see only slow queries.
There are two configuration knobs that can be used to adjust the thresholds for when queries are logged.
hbase.ipc.warn.response.time Maximum number of milliseconds that a query can be run without being logged. Defaults to 10000, or 10 seconds. Can be set to -1 to disable logging by time.
hbase.ipc.warn.response.size Maximum byte size of response that a query can return without being logged. Defaults to 100 megabytes. Can be set to -1 to disable logging by size.
The slow query log exposes to metrics to JMX.
hadoop.regionserver_rpc_slowResponse a global metric reflecting the durations of all responses that triggered logging.
hadoop.regionserver_rpc_methodName.aboveOneSec A metric reflecting the durations of all responses that lasted for more than one second.
The output is tagged with operation e.g.
(operationTooSlow) if the call was a client operation, such as a Put, Get, or Delete, which we expose detailed fingerprint information for. If not, it is tagged
(responseTooSlow) and still produces parseable JSON output, but with less verbose information solely regarding its duration and size in the RPC itself.
TooLarge is substituted for
TooSlow if the response size triggered the logging, with
TooLarge appearing even in the case that both size and duration triggered logging.
2011-09-08 10:01:25,824 WARN org.apache.hadoop.ipc.HBaseServer: (operationTooSlow): {"tables":{"riley2":{"puts":[{"totalColumns":11,"families":{"actions":[{"timestamp":1315501284459,"qualifier":"0","vlen":9667580},{"timestamp":1315501284459,"qualifier":"1","vlen":10122412},{"timestamp":1315501284459,"qualifier":"2","vlen":11104617},{"timestamp":1315501284459,"qualifier":"3","vlen":13430635}]},"row":"cfcd208495d565ef66e7dff9f98764da:0"}],"families":["actions"]}},"processingtimems":956,"client":"10.47.34.63:33623","starttimems":1315501284456,"queuetimems":0,"totalPuts":1,"class":"HRegionServer","responsesize":0,"method":"multiPut"}
Note that everything inside the "tables" structure is output produced by MultiPut's fingerprint, while the rest of the information is RPC-specific, such as processing time and client IP/port. Other client operations follow the same pattern and the same general structure, with necessary differences due to the nature of the individual operations. In the case that the call is not a client operation, that detailed fingerprint information will be completely absent.
This particular example, for example, would indicate that the likely cause of slowness is simply a very large (on the order of 100MB) multiput, as we can tell by the "vlen," or value length, fields of each put in the multiPut.
See Cluster Replication.
There are two broad strategies for performing HBase backups: backing up with a full cluster shutdown, and backing up on a live cluster. Each approach has pros and cons.
For additional information, see HBase Backup Options over on the Sematext Blog.
Some environments can tolerate a periodic full shutdown of their HBase cluster, for example if it is being used a back-end analytic capacity and not serving front-end web-pages. The benefits are that the NameNode/Master are RegionServers are down, so there is no chance of missing any in-flight changes to either StoreFiles or metadata. The obvious con is that the cluster is down. The steps include:
Distcp could be used to either copy the contents of the HBase directory in HDFS to either the same cluster in another directory, or to a different cluster.
Note: Distcp works in this situation because the cluster is down and there are no in-flight edits to files. Distcp-ing of files in the HBase directory is not generally recommended on a live cluster.
The backup of the hbase directory from HDFS is copied onto the 'real' hbase directory via distcp. The act of copying these files creates new HDFS metadata, which is why a restore of the NameNode edits from the time of the HBase backup isn't required for this kind of restore, because it's a restore (via distcp) of a specific HDFS directory (i.e., the HBase part) not the entire HDFS file-system.
This approach assumes that there is a second cluster. See the HBase page on replication for more information.
The Section 14.1.6, "CopyTable" utility could either be used to copy data from one table to another on the same cluster, or to copy data to another table on another cluster.
Since the cluster is up, there is a risk that edits could be missed in the copy process.
The Section 14.1.7, "Export" approach dumps the content of a table to HDFS on the same cluster. To restore the data, the Section 14.1.8, "Import" utility would be used.
Since the cluster is up, there is a risk that edits could be missed in the export process.
HBase Snapshots allow you to take a snapshot of a table without too much impact on Region Servers. Snapshot, Clone and restore operations don't involve data copying. Also, Exporting the snapshot to another cluster doesn't have impact on the Region Servers.
Prior to version 0.94.6, the only way to backup or to clone a table is to use CopyTable/ExportTable, or to copy all the hfiles in HDFS after disabling the table. The disadvantages of these methods are that you can degrade region server performance (Copy/Export Table) or you need to disable the table, that means no reads or writes; and this is usually unacceptable.
To turn on the snapshot support just set the
hbase.snapshot.enabled property to true.
(Snapshots are enabled by default in 0.95+ and off by default in 0.94.6+)
<property> <name>hbase.snapshot.enabled</name> <value>true</value> </property>
You can take a snapshot of a table regardless of whether it is enabled or disabled. The snapshot operation doesn't involve any data copying.
$ ./bin/hbase shell hbase> snapshot 'myTable', 'myTableSnapshot-122112'
List all snapshots taken (by printing the names and relative information).
$ ./bin/hbase shell hbase> list_snapshots
You can remove a snapshot, and the files retained for that snapshot will be removed if no longer needed.
$ ./bin/hbase shell hbase> delete_snapshot 'myTableSnapshot-122112'
From a snapshot you can create a new table (clone operation) with the same data that you had when the snapshot was taken. The clone operation, doesn't involve data copies, and a change to the cloned table doesn't impact the snapshot or the original table.
$ ./bin/hbase shell hbase> clone_snapshot 'myTableSnapshot-122112', 'myNewTestTable'
The restore operation requires the table to be disabled, and the table will be restored to the state at the time when the snapshot was taken, changing both data and schema if required.
$ ./bin/hbase shell hbase> disable 'myTable' hbase> restore_snapshot 'myTableSnapshot-122112'
Since Replication works at log level and snapshots at file-system level, after a restore, the replicas will be in a different state from the master. If you want to use restore, you need to stop replication and redo the bootstrap.
In case of partial data-loss due to misbehaving client, instead of a full restore that requires the table to be disabled, you can clone the table from the snapshot and use a Map-Reduce job to copy the data that you need, from the clone to the main one.
The ExportSnapshot tool copies all the data related to a snapshot (hfiles, logs, snapshot metadata) to another cluster. The tool executes a Map-Reduce job, similar to distcp, to copy files between the two clusters, and since it works at file-system level the hbase cluster does not have to be online.
To copy a snapshot called MySnapshot to an HBase cluster srv2 (hdfs:///srv2:8082/hbase) using 16 mappers:
$ bin/hbase class org.apache.hadoop.hbase.snapshot.ExportSnapshot -snapshot MySnapshot -copy-to hdfs:///srv2:8082/hbase -mappers 16
A common question for HBase administrators is estimating how much storage will be required for an HBase cluster. There are several apsects to consider, the most important of which is what data load into the cluster. Start with a solid understanding of how HBase handles data internally (KeyValue).
HBase storage will be dominated by KeyValues. See Section 126.96.36.199, "KeyValue" and Section 6.3.2, "Try to minimize row and column sizes" for how HBase stores data internally.
It is critical to understand that there is a KeyValue instance for every attribute stored in a row, and the rowkey-length, ColumnFamily name-length and attribute lengths will drive the size of the database more than any other factor.
KeyValue instances are aggregated into blocks, and the blocksize is configurable on a per-ColumnFamily basis. Blocks are aggregated into StoreFile's. See Section 9.7, "Regions".
Another common question for HBase administrators is determining the right number of regions per RegionServer. This affects both storage and hardware planning. See Section 11.4.1, "Number of Regions".
Table of Contents
This chapter will be of interest only to those building and developing Apache HBase (TM) (i.e., as opposed to just downloading the latest distribution).
There are two different repositories for Apache HBase: Subversion (SVN) and Git. The former is the system of record for committers, but the latter is easier to work with to build and contribute. SVN updates get automatically propagated to the Git repo.
Under the
dev-support folder, you will find
We encourage you to have this formatter in place in eclipse when editing HBase code. To load it into eclipse:
Go to Eclipse->Preferences...
In Preferences, Go to Java->Code Style->Formatter
Click Apply
Still in Preferences, Go to Java->Editor->Save Actions
Check the following:
Perform the selected actions on save
Format source code
Format edited lines
Click Apply
In addition to the automatic formatting, make sure you follow the style guidelines explained in Section 15.11.5, "Common Patch Feedback"
Also, no @author tags - that's a rule. Quality Javadoc comments are appreciated. And include the Apache license.
Download and install the Subversive plugin.
Set up an SVN Repository target from Section 15.1.1, "SVN", then check out the code.
If you cloned the project via git, download and install the Git plugin (EGit). Attach to your local git repo (via the Git Repositories window) and you'll be able to see file revision history, generate patches, etc.
The easiest way is to use the m2eclipse plugin for Eclipse. Eclipse Indigo or newer has m2eclipse built-in, or it can be found here:http://www.eclipse.org/m2e/. M2Eclipse provides Maven integration for Eclipse - it even lets you use the direct Maven commands from within Eclipse to compile and test your project.
To import the project, you merely need to go to File->Import...Maven->Existing Maven Projects and then point Eclipse at the HBase root directory; m2eclipse will automatically find all the hbase modules for you.
If you install m2eclipse and import HBase in your workspace, you will have to fix your eclipse Build Path.
target folder, add
target/generated-sources/java folders. You may also remove from your Build Path
the exclusions on the
src/main/resources and
to avoid error message in the console 'Failed to execute goal org.apache.maven.plugins:maven-antrun-plugin:1.6:run (default) on project hbase:
'An Ant BuildException has occured: Replace: source file .../target/classes/hbase-default.xml doesn't exist'. This will also
reduce the eclipse build cycles and make your life easier when developing.
For those not inclined to use m2eclipse, you can generate the Eclipse files from the command line. First, run (you should only have to do this once):
mvn clean install -DskipTests
and then close Eclipse and execute...
mvn eclipse:eclipse
... from your local HBase project directory in your workspace to generate some new
.classpathfiles. Then reopen Eclipse, or refresh your eclipse project (F5), and import
the .project file in the HBase directory to a workspace.
M2_REPO classpath variable needs to be set up for the project. This needs to be set to
your local Maven repository, which is usually
Description Resource Path Location Type The project cannot be built until build path errors are resolved hbase Unknown Java Problem Unbound classpath variable: 'M2_REPO/asm/asm/3.1/asm-3.1.jar' in project 'hbase' hbase Build path Build Path Problem Unbound classpath variable: 'M2_REPO/com/github/stephenc/high-scale-lib/high-scale-lib/1.1.1/high-scale-lib-1.1.1.jar' in project 'hbase' hbase Build path Build Path Problem Unbound classpath variable: 'M2_REPO/com/google/guava/guava/r09/guava-r09.jar' in project 'hbase' hbase Build path Build Path Problem Unbound classpath variable: 'M2_REPO/com/google/protobuf/protobuf-java/2.3.0/protobuf-java-2.3.0.jar' in project 'hbase' hbase Build path Build Path Problem Unbound classpath variable:
Eclipse will currently complain about
Bytes.java. It is not possible to turn these errors off.
Description Resource Path Location Type Access restriction: The method arrayBaseOffset(Class) from the type Unsafe is not accessible due to restriction on required library /System/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/1.6.0.jdk/Contents/Classes/classes.jar Bytes.java /hbase/src/main/java/org/apache/hadoop/hbase/util line 1061 Java Problem Access restriction: The method arrayIndexScale(Class) from the type Unsafe is not accessible due to restriction on required library /System/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/1.6.0.jdk/Contents/Classes/classes.jar Bytes.java /hbase/src/main/java/org/apache/hadoop/hbase/util line 1064 Java Problem Access restriction: The method getLong(Object, long) from the type Unsafe is not accessible due to restriction on required library /System/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/1.6.0.jdk/Contents/Classes/classes.jar Bytes.java /hbase/src/main/java/org/apache/hadoop/hbase/util line 1111 Java Problem
For additional information on setting up Eclipse for HBase development on Windows, see Michael Morello's blog on the topic.
Thanks to maven, building HBase is pretty easy. You can read about the various maven commands in Section 15.8, "Maven Build Commands", but the simplest command to compile HBase from its java source code is:
mvn package -DskipTests
Or, to clean up before compiling:
mvn clean package -DskipTests
With Eclipse set up as explained above in Section 15.2.1, "Eclipse", you can also simply use the build command in Eclipse. To create the full installable HBase package takes a little bit more work, so read on.
-Dsnappy to trigger the snappy maven profile for building
snappy native libs into hbase. See also Section C.5, "
Do the following to build the HBase tarball. Passing the -Prelease will generate javadoc and run the RAT plugin to verify licenses on source.
% MAVEN_OPTS="-Xmx2g" mvn clean site install assembly:assembly -DskipTests -Prelease
If you see
Unable to find resource 'VM_global_library.vm', ignore it.
Its not an error. It is officially ugly though.
Follow the instructions at Publishing Maven Artifacts after reading the below miscellaney.
You must use maven 3.0.x (Check by running mvn -version).
Let me list out the commands I used first. The sections that follow dig in more on what is going on. In this example, we are releasing the 0.92.2 jar to the apache maven repository.
# First make a copy of the tag we want to release; presumes the release has been tagged already # We do this because we need to make some commits for the mvn release plugin to work. 853 svn copy -m "Publishing 0.92.2 to mvn" https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/hbase/tags/0.92.2 https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/hbase/tags/0.92.2mvn 857 svn checkout https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/hbase/tags/0.92.2mvn 858 cd 0.92.2mvn/ # Edit the version making it release version with a '-SNAPSHOT' suffix (See below for more on this) 860 vi pom.xml 861 svn commit -m "Add SNAPSHOT to the version" pom.xml 862 ~/bin/mvn/bin/mvn release:clean 865 ~/bin/mvn/bin/mvn release:prepare 866 # Answer questions and then ^C to kill the build after the last question. See below for more on this. 867 vi release.properties # Change the references to trunk svn to be 0.92.2mvn; the release plugin presumes trunk # Then restart the release:prepare -- it won't ask questions # because the properties file exists. 868 ~/bin/mvn/bin/mvn release:prepare # The apache-release profile comes from the apache parent pom and does signing of artifacts published 869 ~/bin/mvn/bin/mvn release:perform -Papache-release # When done copying up to apache staging repository, # browse to repository.apache.org, login and finish # the release as according to the above # "Publishing Maven Artifacts.
Below is more detail on the commmands listed above.
At the mvn release:perform step, before starting, if you are for example releasing hbase 0.92.2, you need to make sure the pom.xml version is 0.92.2-SNAPSHOT. This needs to be checked in. Since we do the maven release after actual release, I've been doing this checkin into a copy of the release tag rather than into the actual release tag itself (presumes the release has been properly tagged in svn). So, say we released hbase 0.92.2 and now we want to do the release to the maven repository, in svn, the 0.92.2 release will be tagged 0.92.2. Making the maven release, copy the 0.92.2 tag to 0.92.2mvn. Check out this tag and change the version therein and commit.
Currently, the mvn release wants to go against trunk. I haven't figured how to tell it to do otherwise
so I do the below hack. The hack comprises answering the questions put to you by the mvn release plugin properly,
then immediately control-C'ing the build after the last question asked as the build release step starts to run.
After control-C'ing it, You'll notice a release.properties in your build dir. Review it.
Make sure it is using the proper branch -- it tends to use trunk rather than the 0.92.2mvn or whatever
that you want it to use -- so hand edit the release.properties file that was put under
by the release:perform invocation. When done, resstart the
Here is how I'd answer the questions at release:prepare time:
What is the release version for "HBase"? (org.apache.hbase:hbase) 0.92.2: : What is SCM release tag or label for "HBase"? (org.apache.hbase:hbase) hbase-0.92.2: : 0.92.2mvn What is the new development version for "HBase"? (org.apache.hbase:hbase) 0.92.3-SNAPSHOT: : [INFO] Transforming 'HBase'...
When you run release:perform, pass -Papache-release else it will not 'sign' the artifacts it uploads.
A strange issue I ran into was the one where the upload into the apache repository was being sprayed across multiple apache machines making it so I could not release. See INFRA-4482 Why is my upload to mvn spread across multiple repositories?.
Here is my
This is read by the release plugin. The apache-release profile will pick up your
gpg key setup from here if you've specified it into the file. The password
can be maven encrypted as suggested in the "Publishing Maven Artifacts" but plain
text password works too (just don't let anyone see your local settings.xml).
<settings xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/SETTINGS/1.0.0" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/SETTINGS/1.0.0 http://maven.apache.org/xsd/settings-1.0.0.xsd"> <servers> <!- To publish a snapshot of some part of Maven --> <server> <id>apache.snapshots.https</id> <username>YOUR_APACHE_ID </username> <password>YOUR_APACHE_PASSWORD </password> </server> <!-- To publish a website using Maven --> <!-- To stage a release of some part of Maven --> <server> <id>apache.releases.https</id> <username>YOUR_APACHE_ID </username> <password>YOUR_APACHE_PASSWORD </password> </server> </servers> <profiles> <profile> <id>apache-release</id> <properties> <gpg.keyname>YOUR_KEYNAME</gpg.keyname> <!--Keyname is something like this ... 00A5F21E... do gpg --list-keys to find it--> <gpg.passphrase>YOUR_KEY_PASSWORD </gpg.passphrase> </properties> </profile> </profiles> </settings>
If you see run into the below, its because you need to edit version in the pom.xml and add
-SNAPSHOT to the version (and commit).
[INFO] Scanning for projects... [INFO] Searching repository for plugin with prefix: 'release'. [INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [INFO] Building HBase [INFO] task-segment: [release:prepare] (aggregator-style) [INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [INFO] [release:prepare {execution: default-cli}] [INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [ERROR] BUILD FAILURE [INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [INFO] You don't have a SNAPSHOT project in the reactor projects list. [INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [INFO] For more information, run Maven with the -e switch [INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [INFO] Total time: 3 seconds [INFO] Finished at: Sat Mar 26 18:11:07 PDT 2011 [INFO] Final Memory: 35M/423M [INFO] -----------------------------------------------------------------------
The manual is marked up using docbook.
We then use the docbkx maven plugin
to transform the markup to html. This plugin is run when you specify the site
goal as in when you run mvn site or you can call the plugin explicitly to
just generate the manual by doing mvn docbkx:generate-html
(TODO: It looks like you have to run mvn site first because docbkx wants to
include a transformed
hbase-default.xml. Fix).
When you run mvn site, we do the document generation twice, once to generate the multipage
manual and then again for the single page manual (the single page version is easier to search).
The Apache HBase apache web site (including this reference guide) is maintained as part of the main Apache HBase source tree, under
/src/docbkx and
/src/site. The former is this reference guide; the latter, in most cases, are legacy pages that are in the process of being merged into the docbkx tree.
To contribute to the reference guide, edit these files and submit them as a patch (see Section 15.11, "Submitting Patches"). Your Jira should contain a summary of the changes in each section (see HBASE-6081 for an example).
To generate the site locally while you're working on it, run:
mvn site
Then you can load up the generated HTML files in your browser (file are under
As of INFRA-5680 Migrate apache hbase website,
to publish the website, build it, and then deploy it over a checkout of
and then check it in. For example, if trunk is checked out out at
and hbase.apache.org is checked out at
/Users/stack/checkouts/hbase.apache.org/trunk, to update
the site, do the following:
# Build the site and deploy it to the checked out directory # Getting the javadoc into site is a little tricky. You have to build it independent, then # 'aggregate' it at top-level so the pre-site site lifecycle step can find it; that is # what the javadoc:javadoc and javadoc:aggregate is about. $ MAVEN_OPTS=" -Xmx3g" mvn clean -DskipTests javadoc:javadoc javadoc:aggregate site site:stage -DstagingDirectory=/Users/stack/checkouts/hbase.apache.org/trunk # Check the deployed site by viewing in a brower. # If all is good, commit it and it will show up at http://hbase.apache.org # $ cd /Users/stack/checkouts/hbase.apache.org/trunk $ svn commit -m 'Committing latest version of website...'
Developers, at a minimum, should familiarize themselves with the unit test detail; unit tests in HBase have a character not usually seen in other projects.
As of 0.96, Apache HBase is split into multiple modules which creates "interesting" rules for
how and where tests are written. If you are writting code for
hbase-server, see
Section 15.7.2, "Unit Tests" for how to write your tests; these tests can spin
up a minicluster and will need to be categorized. For any other module, for example
hbase-common, the tests must be strict unit tests and just test the class
under test - no use of the HBaseTestingUtility or minicluster is allowed (or even possible
given the dependency tree).
mvn testwhich will just run the tests IN THAT MODULE. If there are other dependencies on other modules, then you will have run the command from the ROOT HBASE DIRECTORY. This will run the tests in the other modules, unless you specify to skip the tests in that module. For instance, to skip the tests in the hbase-server module, you would run:
mvn clean test -PskipServerTestsfrom the top level directory to run all the tests in modules other than hbase-server. Note that you can specify to skip tests in multiple modules as well as just for a single module. For example, to skip the tests in
hbase-server and
hbase-common, you would run:
mvn clean test -PskipServerTests -PskipCommonTests
Also, keep in mind that if you are running tests in the
hbase-server module you will need to
apply the maven profiles discussed in Section 15.7.3, "Running tests" to get the tests to run properly.
Apache HBase unit tests are subdivided into four categories: small, medium, large, and
integration with corresponding JUnit categories:
JUnit categories are denoted using java annotations and look like this in your unit test code.
... @Category(SmallTests.class) public class TestHRegionInfo { @Test public void testCreateHRegionInfoName() throws Exception { // ... } }
The above example shows how to mark a unit test as belonging to the small category. All unit tests in HBase have a categorization.
The first three categories, small, medium, and large are for tests run when
you type
$ mvn test; i.e. these three categorizations are for
HBase unit tests. The integration category is for not for unit tests but for integration
tests. These are run when you invoke
$ mvn verify. Integration tests
are described in Section 15.7.5, "Integration Tests" and will not be discussed further
in this section on HBase unit tests.
Apache HBase uses a patched maven surefire plugin and maven profiles to implement its unit test characterizations.
Read the below to figure which annotation of the set small, medium, and large to put on your new HBase unit test.
Small tests are executed in a shared JVM. We put in this category all the tests that can be executed quickly in a shared JVM. The maximum execution time for a small test is 15 seconds, and small tests should not use a (mini)cluster.
Medium tests represent tests that must be executed before proposing a patch. They are designed to run in less than 30 minutes altogether, and are quite stable in their results. They are designed to last less than 50 seconds individually. They can use a cluster, and each of them is executed in a separate JVM.
Large tests are everything else. They are typically large-scale tests, regression tests for specific bugs, timeout tests, performance tests. They are executed before a commit on the pre-integration machines. They can be run on the developer machine as well.
Integration tests are system level tests. See Section 15.7.5, "Integration Tests" for more info.
Below we describe how to run the Apache HBase junit categories.
mvn test
will execute all small tests in a single JVM (no fork) and then medium tests in a separate JVM for each test instance. Medium tests are NOT executed if there is an error in a small test. Large tests are NOT executed. There is one report for small tests, and one report for medium tests if they are executed.
mvn test -P runAllTests
will execute small tests in a single JVM then medium and large tests in a separate JVM for each test. Medium and large tests are NOT executed if there is an error in a small test. Large tests are NOT executed if there is an error in a small or medium test. There is one report for small tests, and one report for medium and large tests if they are executed.
To run an individual test, e.g.
MyTest, do
mvn test -Dtest=MyTest
You can also pass multiple, individual tests as a comma-delimited list:
mvn test -Dtest=MyTest1,MyTest2,MyTest3
You can also pass a package, which will run all tests under the package:
mvn test -Dtest=org.apache.hadoop.hbase.client.*
-Dtest is specified,
localTests profile will be used. It will use the official release
of maven surefire, rather than our custom surefire plugin, and the old connector (The HBase build uses a patched
version of the maven surefire plugin). Each junit tests is executed in a separate JVM (A fork per test class).
There is no parallelization when tests are running in this mode. You will see a new message at the end of the
-report: "[INFO] Tests are skipped". It's harmless. While you need to make sure the sum of
Tests run: in
Results : section of test reports matching the number of tests you specified because no
error will be reported when a non-existent test case is specified.
mvn test -P runSmallTests
will execute "small" tests only, using a single JVM.
mvn test -P runMediumTests
will execute "medium" tests only, launching a new JVM for each test-class.
mvn test -P runLargeTests
will execute "large" tests only, launching a new JVM for each test-class.
For convenience, you can run
mvn test -P runDevTests
to execute both small and medium tests, using a single JVM.
By default,
$ mvn test -P runAllTests runs 5 tests in parallel.
It can be increased on a developer's machine. Allowing that you can have 2
tests in parallel per core, and you need about 2Gb of memory per test (at the
extreme), if you have an 8 core, 24Gb box, you can have 16 tests in parallel.
but the memory available limits it to 12 (24/2), To run all tests with 12 tests
in parallell, do this:
mvn test -P runAllTests -Dsurefire.secondPartThreadCount=12.
To increase the speed, you can as well use a ramdisk. You will need 2Gb of memory
to run all tests. You will also need to delete the files between two test run.
The typical way to configure a ramdisk on Linux is:
$ sudo mkdir /ram2G sudo mount -t tmpfs -o size=2048M tmpfs /ram2G
You can then use it to run all HBase tests with the command: mvn test -P runAllTests -Dsurefire.secondPartThreadCount=12 -Dtest.build.data.basedirectory=/ram2G
It's also possible to use the script hbasetests.sh. This script runs the medium and
large tests in parallel with two maven instances, and provides a single report. This script does not use
the hbase version of surefire so no parallelization is being done other than the two maven instances the
script sets up.
It must be executed from the directory which contains the
For example running
will execute small and medium tests. Running
./dev-support/hbasetests.sh runAllTests
will execute all tests. Running
./dev-support/hbasetests.sh replayFailed
will rerun the failed tests a second time, in a separate jvm and without parallelisation.
A custom Maven SureFire plugin listener checks a number of resources before
and after each HBase unit test runs and logs its findings at the end of the test
output files which can be found in
per Maven module (Tests write test reports named for the test class into this directory.
Check the
*-out.txt files). The resources counted are the number
of threads, the number of file descriptors, etc. If the number has increased, it adds
a LEAK? comment in the logs. As you can have an HBase instance
running in the background, some threads can be deleted/created without any specific
action in the test. However, if the test does not work as expected, or if the test
should not impact these resources, it's worth checking these log lines
...hbase.ResourceChecker(157): before... and
...hbase.ResourceChecker(157): after.... For example:
2012-09-26 09:22:15,315 INFO [pool-1-thread-1] hbase.ResourceChecker(157): after: regionserver.TestColumnSeeking#testReseeking Thread=65 (was 65), OpenFileDescriptor=107 (was 107), MaxFileDescriptor=10240 (was 10240), ConnectionCount=1 (was 1)
This class offers helper functions to create a temp directory and do the cleanup, or to start a cluster.
Whenever possible, tests should not use
Thread.sleep, but rather waiting for the real event they need. This is faster and clearer for the reader.
Tests should not do a
Thread.sleep without testing an ending condition. This allows understanding what the test is waiting for. Moreover, the test will work whatever the machine performance is.
Sleep should be minimal to be as fast as possible. Waiting for a variable should be done in a 40ms sleep loop. Waiting for a socket operation should be done in a 200 ms sleep loop.
Tests using a HRegion do not have to start a cluster: A region can use the local file system.
Start/stopping a cluster cost around 10 seconds. They should not be started per test method but per test class.
Started cluster must be shutdown using
HBaseTestingUtility#shutdownMiniCluster, which cleans the directories.
As most as possible, tests should use the default settings for the cluster. When they don't, they should document it. This will allow to share the cluster later.
HBase integration/system tests are tests that are beyond HBase unit tests. They are generally long-lasting, sizeable (the test can be asked to 1M rows or 1B rows), targetable (they can take configuration that will point them at the ready-made cluster they are to run against; integration tests do not include cluster start/stop code), and verifying success, integration tests rely on public APIs only; they do not attempt to examine server internals asserting success/fail. Integration tests are what you would run when you need to more elaborate proofing of a release candidate beyond what unit tests can do. They are not generally run on the Apache Continuous Integration build server, however, some sites opt to run integration tests as a part of their continuous testing on an actual cluster.
Integration tests currently live under the
src/test directory
in the hbase-it submodule and will match the regex:
All integration tests are also annotated with
Integration tests can be run in two modes: using a mini cluster, or against an actual distributed cluster.
Maven failsafe is used to run the tests using the mini cluster. IntegrationTestsDriver class is used for
executing the tests against a distributed cluster. Integration tests SHOULD NOT assume that they are running against a
mini cluster, and SHOULD NOT use private API's to access cluster state. To interact with the distributed or mini
cluster uniformly,
IntegrationTestingUtility, and
HBaseCluster classes,
and public client API's can be used.
On a distributed cluster, integration tests that use ChaosMonkey or otherwise manipulate services thru cluster manager (e.g. restart regionservers) use SSH to do it.
To run these, test process should be able to run commands on remote end, so ssh should be configured accordingly (for example, if HBase runs under hbase
user in your cluster, you can set up passwordless ssh for that user and run the test also under it). To facilitate that,
hbase.it.clustermanager.ssh.opts and
hbase.it.clustermanager.ssh.cmd configuration settings can be used. "User" is the remote user that cluster manager should use to perform ssh commands.
"Opts" contains additional options that are passed to SSH (for example, "-i /tmp/my-key").
Finally, if you have some custom environment setup, "cmd" is the override format for the entire tunnel (ssh) command. The default string is {
/usr/bin/ssh %1$s %2$s%3$s%4$s "%5$s"} and is a good starting point. This is a standard Java format string with 5 arguments that is used to execute the remote command. The argument 1 (%1$s) is SSH options set the via opts setting or via environment variable, 2 is SSH user name, 3 is "@" if username is set or "" otherwise, 4 is the target host name, and 5 is the logical command to execute (that may include single quotes, so don't use them). For example, if you run the tests under non-hbase user and want to ssh as that user and change to hbase on remote machine, you can use {
/usr/bin/ssh %1$s %2$s%3$s%4$s "su hbase - -c \"%5$s\""}. That way, to kill RS (for example) integration tests may run {
/usr/bin/ssh some-hostname "su hbase - -c \"ps aux | ... | kill ...\""}.
The command is logged in the test logs, so you can verify it is correct for your environment.
HBase 0.92 added a
verify maven target.
Invoking it, for example by doing
mvn verify, will
run all the phases up to and including the verify phase via the
maven failsafe plugin,
running all the above mentioned HBase unit tests as well as tests that are in the HBase integration test group.
After you have completed
mvn install -DskipTests
You can run just the integration tests by invoking:
cd hbase-it mvn verify
If you just want to run the integration tests in top-level, you need to run two commands. First:
mvn failsafe:integration-test
This actually runs ALL the integration tests.
This command will always output
BUILD SUCCESS even if there are test failures.
At this point, you could grep the output by hand looking for failed tests. However, maven will do this for us; just use:
mvn failsafe:verify
The above command basically looks at all the test results (so don't remove the 'target' directory) for test failures and reports the results.
This is very similar to how you specify running a subset of unit tests (see above), but use the property
it.test instead of
To just run
IntegrationTestClassXYZ.java, use:
mvn failsafe:integration-test -Dit.test=IntegrationTestClassXYZ
The next thing you might want to do is run groups of integration tests, say all integration tests that are named IntegrationTestClassX*.java:
mvn failsafe:integration-test -Dit.test=*ClassX*
This runs everything that is an integration test that matches *ClassX*. This means anything matching: "**/IntegrationTest*ClassX*". You can also run multiple groups of integration tests using comma-delimited lists (similar to unit tests). Using a list of matches still supports full regex matching for each of the groups.This would look something like:
mvn failsafe:integration-test -Dit.test=*ClassX*, *ClassY
If you have an already-setup HBase cluster, you can launch the integration tests by invoking the class
IntegrationTestsDriver. You may have to
run test-compile first. The configuration will be picked by the bin/hbase script.
mvn test-compile
Then launch the tests with:
bin/hbase [--config config_dir] org.apache.hadoop.hbase.IntegrationTestsDriver [-test=class_regex]
This execution will launch the tests under
hbase-it/src/test, having
@Category(IntegrationTests.class) annotation,
and a name starting with
IntegrationTests. If specified, class_regex will be used to filter test classes. The regex is checked against full class name; so, part of class name can be used.
IntegrationTestsDriver uses Junit to run the tests. Currently there is no support for running integration tests against a distributed cluster using maven (see HBASE-6201).
The tests interact with the distributed cluster by using the methods in the
DistributedHBaseCluster (implementing
HBaseCluster) class, which in turn uses a pluggable
ClusterManager. Concrete implementations provide actual functionality for carrying out deployment-specific and environment-dependent tasks (SSH, etc). The default
ClusterManager is
HBaseClusterManager, which uses SSH to remotely execute start/stop/kill/signal commands, and assumes some posix commands (ps, etc). Also assumes the user running the test has enough "power" to start/stop servers on the remote machines. By default, it picks up
HBASE_SSH_OPTS, HBASE_HOME, HBASE_CONF_DIR from the env, and uses
bin/hbase-daemon.sh to carry out the actions. Currently tarball deployments, deployments which uses hbase-daemons.sh, and Apache Ambari deployments are supported. /etc/init.d/ scripts are not supported for now, but it can be easily added. For other deployment options, a ClusterManager can be implemented and plugged in.
In 0.96, a tool named
ChaosMonkey has been introduced. It is modeled after the same-named tool by Netflix.
Some of the tests use ChaosMonkey to simulate faults in the running cluster in the way of killing random servers,
disconnecting servers, etc. ChaosMonkey can also be used as a stand-alone tool to run a (misbehaving) policy while you
are running other tests.
ChaosMonkey defines Action's and Policy's. Actions are sequences of events. We have at least the following actions:
Policies on the other hand are responsible for executing the actions based on a strategy. The default policy is to execute a random action every minute based on predefined action weights. ChaosMonkey executes predefined named policies until it is stopped. More than one policy can be active at any time.
To run ChaosMonkey as a standalone tool deploy your HBase cluster as usual. ChaosMonkey uses the configuration from the bin/hbase script, thus no extra configuration needs to be done. You can invoke the ChaosMonkey by running:
bin/hbase org.apache.hadoop.hbase.util.ChaosMonkey
This will output smt like:
12/11/19 23:21:57 INFO util.ChaosMonkey: Using ChaosMonkey Policy: class org.apache.hadoop.hbase.util.ChaosMonkey$PeriodicRandomActionPolicy, period:60000 12/11/19 23:21:57 INFO util.ChaosMonkey: Sleeping for 26953 to add jitter 12/11/19 23:22:24 INFO util.ChaosMonkey: Performing action: Restart active master 12/11/19 23:22:24 INFO util.ChaosMonkey: Killing master:master.example.com,60000,1353367210440 12/11/19 23:22:24 INFO hbase.HBaseCluster: Aborting Master: master.example.com,60000,1353367210440 12/11/19 23:22:24 INFO hbase.ClusterManager: Executing remote command: ps aux | grep master | grep -v grep | tr -s ' ' | cut -d ' ' -f2 | xargs kill -s SIGKILL , hostname:master.example.com 12/11/19 23:22:25 INFO hbase.ClusterManager: Executed remote command, exit code:0 , output: 12/11/19 23:22:25 INFO hbase.HBaseCluster: Waiting service:master to stop: master.example.com,60000,1353367210440 12/11/19 23:22:25 INFO hbase.ClusterManager: Executing remote command: ps aux | grep master | grep -v grep | tr -s ' ' | cut -d ' ' -f2 , hostname:master.example.com 12/11/19 23:22:25 INFO hbase.ClusterManager: Executed remote command, exit code:0 , output: 12/11/19 23:22:25 INFO util.ChaosMonkey: Killed master server:master.example.com,60000,1353367210440 12/11/19 23:22:25 INFO util.ChaosMonkey: Sleeping for:5000 12/11/19 23:22:30 INFO util.ChaosMonkey: Starting master:master.example.com 12/11/19 23:22:30 INFO hbase.HBaseCluster: Starting Master on: master.example.com 12/11/19 23:22:30 INFO hbase.ClusterManager: Executing remote command: /homes/enis/code/hbase-0.94/bin/../bin/hbase-daemon.sh --config /homes/enis/code/hbase-0.94/bin/../conf start master , hostname:master.example.com 12/11/19 23:22:31 INFO hbase.ClusterManager: Executed remote command, exit code:0 , output:starting master, logging to /homes/enis/code/hbase-0.94/bin/../logs/hbase-enis-master-master.example.com.out .... 12/11/19 23:22:33 INFO util.ChaosMonkey: Started master: master.example.com,60000,1353367210440 12/11/19 23:22:33 INFO util.ChaosMonkey: Sleeping for:51321 12/11/19 23:23:24 INFO util.ChaosMonkey: Performing action: Restart random region server 12/11/19 23:23:24 INFO util.ChaosMonkey: Killing region server:rs3.example.com,60020,1353367027826 12/11/19 23:23:24 INFO hbase.HBaseCluster: Aborting RS: rs3.example.com,60020,1353367027826 12/11/19 23:23:24 INFO hbase.ClusterManager: Executing remote command: ps aux | grep regionserver | grep -v grep | tr -s ' ' | cut -d ' ' -f2 | xargs kill -s SIGKILL , hostname:rs3.example.com 12/11/19 23:23:25 INFO hbase.ClusterManager: Executed remote command, exit code:0 , output: 12/11/19 23:23:25 INFO hbase.HBaseCluster: Waiting service:regionserver to stop: rs3.example.com,60020,1353367027826 12/11/19 23:23:25 INFO hbase.ClusterManager: Executing remote command: ps aux | grep regionserver | grep -v grep | tr -s ' ' | cut -d ' ' -f2 , hostname:rs3.example.com 12/11/19 23:23:25 INFO hbase.ClusterManager: Executed remote command, exit code:0 , output: 12/11/19 23:23:25 INFO util.ChaosMonkey: Killed region server:rs3.example.com,60020,1353367027826. Reported num of rs:6 12/11/19 23:23:25 INFO util.ChaosMonkey: Sleeping for:60000 12/11/19 23:24:25 INFO util.ChaosMonkey: Starting region server:rs3.example.com 12/11/19 23:24:25 INFO hbase.HBaseCluster: Starting RS on: rs3.example.com 12/11/19 23:24:25 INFO hbase.ClusterManager: Executing remote command: /homes/enis/code/hbase-0.94/bin/../bin/hbase-daemon.sh --config /homes/enis/code/hbase-0.94/bin/../conf start regionserver , hostname:rs3.example.com 12/11/19 23:24:26 INFO hbase.ClusterManager: Executed remote command, exit code:0 , output:starting regionserver, logging to /homes/enis/code/hbase-0.94/bin/../logs/hbase-enis-regionserver-rs3.example.com.out 12/11/19 23:24:27 INFO util.ChaosMonkey: Started region server:rs3.example.com,60020,1353367027826. Reported num of rs:6
As you can see from the log, ChaosMonkey started the default PeriodicRandomActionPolicy, which is configured with all the available actions, and ran RestartActiveMaster and RestartRandomRs actions. ChaosMonkey tool, if run from command line, will keep on running until the process is killed.
All commands executed from the local HBase project directory.
Note: use Maven 3 (Maven 2 may work but we suggest you use Maven 3).
See the Section 15.7.3, "Running tests" section above in Section 15.7.2, "Unit Tests"
As of 0.96, Apache HBase supports building against Apache Hadoop versions: 1.0.3, 2.0.0-alpha and 3.0.0-SNAPSHOT. By default, we will build with Hadoop-1.0.3. To change the version to run with Hadoop-2.0.0-alpha, you would run:
mvn -Dhadoop.profile=2.0 ...
That is, designate build with hadoop.profile 2.0. Pass 2.0 for hadoop.profile to build against hadoop 2.0.
Tests may not all pass as of this writing so you may need to pass
-DskipTests unless you are inclined
to fix the failing tests.
Similarly, for 3.0, you would just replace the profile value. Note that Hadoop-3.0.0-SNAPSHOT does not currently have a deployed maven artificat - you will need to build and install your own in your local maven repository if you want to run against this profile.
In earilier verions of Apache HBase, you can build against older versions of Apache Hadoop, notably, Hadoop 0.22.x and 0.23.x. If you are running, for example HBase-0.94 and wanted to build against Hadoop 0.23.x, you would run with:
mvn -Dhadoop.profile=22 ...
Apache HBase gets better only when people contribute!
As Apache HBase is an Apache Software Foundation project, see Appendix H, HBase and the Apache Software Foundation for more information about how the ASF functions.
Sign up for the dev-list and the user-list. See the mailing lists page. Posing questions - and helping to answer other people's questions - is encouraged! There are varying levels of experience on both lists so patience and politeness are encouraged (and please stay on topic.)
Check for existing issues in Jira. If it's either a new feature request, enhancement, or a bug, file a ticket.
The following is a guideline on setting Jira issue priorities:
Most development is done on TRUNK. However, there are branches for minor releases (e.g., 0.90.1, 0.90.2, and 0.90.3 are on the 0.90 branch).
If you have any questions on this just send an email to the dev dist-list.
In HBase we use JUnit 4.
If you need to run miniclusters of HDFS, ZooKeeper, HBase, or MapReduce testing,
be sure to checkout the
Alex Baranau of Sematext describes how it can be used in
HBase Case-Study: Using HBaseTestingUtility for Local Testing and Development (2010).
Sometimes you don't need a full running server
unit testing. For example, some methods can make do with a
org.apache.hadoop.hbase.Server instance
or a
Interface reference rather than a full-blown
In these cases, you maybe able to get away with a mocked
Server instance. For example:
See Section 22.214.171.124, "Code Formatting" and Section 15.11.5, "Common Patch Feedback".
Also, please pay attention to the interface stability/audience classifications that you will see all over our code base. They look like this at the head of the class:
@InterfaceAudience.Public @InterfaceStability.Stable
If the
InterfaceAudience is
we can change the class (and we do not need to include a
InterfaceStability mark).
If a class is marked
Public but its
is marked
Unstable, we can change it. If it's
Evolving, we're allowed to change it
but should try not to. If it's
Public and
we can't change it without a deprecation path or with a really GREAT reason.
When you add new classes, mark them with the annotations above if publically accessible. If you are not cleared on how to mark your additions, ask up on the dev list.
This convention comes from our parent project Hadoop.
We don't have many but what we have we list below. All are subject to challenge of course but until then, please hold to the rules of the road.
ZooKeeper state should transient (treat it like memory). If deleted, hbase should be able to recover and essentially be in the same state[29].
If you are developing Apache HBase, frequently it is useful to test your changes against a more-real cluster than what you find in unit tests. In this case, HBase can be run directly from the source in local-mode. All you need to do is run:
This will spin up a full local-cluster, just as if you had packaged up HBase and installed it on your machine.
Keep in mind that you will need to have installed HBase into your local maven repository for the in-situ cluster to work properly. That is, you will need to run:
mvn clean install -DskipTests
to ensure that maven can find the correct classpath and dependencies. Generally, the above command is just a good thing to try running first, if maven is acting oddly.
If you are new to submitting patches to open source or new to submitting patches to Apache, I'd suggest you start by reading the On Contributing Patches page from Apache Commons Project. Its a nice overview that applies equally to the Apache HBase Project.
See the aforementioned Apache Commons link for how to make patches against a checked out subversion repository. Patch files can also be easily generated from Eclipse, for example by selecting "Team -> Create Patch". Patches can also be created by git diff and svn diff.
Please submit one patch-file per Jira. For example, if multiple files are changed make sure the selected resource when generating the patch is a directory. Patch files can reflect changes in multiple files.
Make sure you review Section 22.214.171.124, "Code Formatting" for code style.
The patch file should have the Apache HBase Jira ticket in the name. For example, if a patch was submitted for
Foo.java, then
a patch file called
Foo_HBASE_XXXX.patch would be acceptable where XXXX is the Apache HBase Jira number.
If you generating from a branch, then including the target branch in the filename is advised, e.g.,
Yes, please. Please try to include unit tests with every code patch (and especially new classes and large changes). Make sure unit tests pass locally before submitting the patch.
Also, see Section 188.8.131.52, "Mockito".
If you are creating a new unit test class, notice how other unit test classes have classification/sizing annotations at the top and a static method on the end. Be sure to include these in any new unit test files you generate. See Section 15.7, "Tests" for more on how the annotations work.
The patch should be attached to the associated Jira ticket "More Actions -> Attach Files". Make sure you click the ASF license inclusion, otherwise the patch can't be considered for inclusion.
Once attached to the ticket, click "Submit Patch" and the status of the ticket will change. Committers will review submitted patches for inclusion into the codebase. Please understand that not every patch may get committed, and that feedback will likely be provided on the patch. Fear not, though, because the Apache HBase community is helpful!
The following items are representative of common patch feedback. Your patch process will go faster if these are taken into account before submission.
See the Java coding standards for more information on coding conventions in Java.
Rather than do this...
if ( foo.equals( bar ) ) { // don't do this
... do this instead...
if (foo.equals(bar)) {
Also, rather than do this...
foo = barArray[ i ]; // don't do this
... do this instead...
foo = barArray[i];
Auto-generated code in Eclipse often looks like this...
public void readFields(DataInput arg0) throws IOException { // don't do this foo = arg0.readUTF(); // don't do this
... do this instead ...
public void readFields(DataInput di) throws IOException { foo = di.readUTF();
See the difference? 'arg0' is what Eclipse uses for arguments by default.
Keep lines less than 100 characters.
Bar bar = foo.veryLongMethodWithManyArguments(argument1, argument2, argument3, argument4, argument5, argument6, argument7, argument8, argument9); // don't do this
... do something like this instead ...
Bar bar = foo.veryLongMethodWithManyArguments( argument1, argument2, argument3,argument4, argument5, argument6, argument7, argument8, argument9);
This happens more than people would imagine.
Bar bar = foo.getBar(); <--- imagine there's an extra space(s) after the semicolon instead of a line break.
Make sure there's a line-break after the end of your code, and also avoid lines that have nothing but whitespace.
In 0.96, HBase moved to protobufs. The below section on Writables applies to 0.94.x and previous, not to 0.96 and beyond.
Every class returned by RegionServers must implement
Writable. If you
are creating a new class that needs to implement this interface, don't forget the default constructor.
This is also a very common feedback item. Don't forget Javadoc!
Javadoc warnings are checked during precommit. If the precommit tool gives you a '-1', please fix the javadoc issue. Your patch won't be committed if it adds such warnings.
Findbugs is used to detect common bugs pattern. As Javadoc, it is checked during the precommit build up on Apache's Jenkins, and as with Javadoc, please fix them. You can run findbugs locally with 'mvn findbugs:findbugs': it will generate the findbugs files locally. Sometimes, you may have to write code smarter than Findbugs. You can annotate your code to tell Findbugs you know what you're doing, by annotating your class with:
@edu.umd.cs.findbugs.annotations.SuppressWarnings( value="HE_EQUALS_USE_HASHCODE", justification="I know what I'm doing")
Note that we're using the apache licensed version of the annotations.
Don't just leave the @param arguments the way your IDE generated them. Don't do this...
/** * * @param bar <---- don't do this!!!! * @return <---- or this!!!! */ public Foo getFoo(Bar bar);
... either add something descriptive to the @param and @return lines, or just remove them. But the preference is to add something descriptive and useful.
If you submit a patch for one thing, don't do auto-reformatting or unrelated reformatting of code on a completely different area of code.
Likewise, don't add unrelated cleanup or refactorings outside the scope of your Jira.
Larger patches should go through ReviewBoard.
For more information on how to use ReviewBoard, see the ReviewBoard documentation.
Committers do this. See How To Commit in the Apache HBase wiki.
Commiters will also resolve the Jira, typically after the patch passes a build.
If a committer commits a patch it is their responsibility to make sure it passes the test suite. It is helpful if contributors keep an eye out that their patch does not break the hbase build and/or tests but ultimately, a contributor cannot be expected to be up on the particular vagaries and interconnections that occur in a project like hbase. A committer should.
[29] There are currently a few exceptions that we need to fix around whether a table is enabled or disabled
Table of Contents
A distributed Apache HBase (TM) installation depends on a running ZooKeeper cluster.
All participating nodes and clients need to be able to access the
running ZooKeeper ensemble. Apache HBase by default manages a ZooKeeper
"cluster" for you. It will start and stop the ZooKeeper ensemble
as part of the HBase start/stop process. You can also manage the
ZooKeeper ensemble independent of HBase and just point HBase at
the cluster it should use. To toggle HBase management of
ZooKeeper, use the
HBASE_MANAGES_ZK variable in
conf/hbase-env.sh. This variable, which
defaults to
true, tells HBase whether to
start/stop the ZooKeeper ensemble servers as part of HBase
When HBase manages the ZooKeeper ensemble, you can specify
ZooKeeper configuration using its native
zoo.cfg file, or, the easier option is to
just specify ZooKeeper options directly in
conf/hbase-site.xml. A ZooKeeper
configuration option can be set as a property in the HBase
hbase-site.xml XML configuration file by
prefacing the ZooKeeper option name with
hbase.zookeeper.property. For example, the
clientPort setting in ZooKeeper can be changed
by setting the
hbase.zookeeper.property.clientPort property.
For all default values used by HBase, including ZooKeeper
configuration, see ???. Look for the
hbase.zookeeper.property prefix [30]
You must at least list the ensemble servers in
hbase-site.xml using the
hbase.zookeeper.quorum property. This property
defaults to a single ensemble member at
localhost which is not suitable for a fully
distributed HBase. (It binds to the local machine only and remote
clients will not be able to connect).
You can run a ZooKeeper ensemble that comprises 1 node only but in production it is recommended that you run a ZooKeeper ensemble of 3, 5 or 7 machines; the more members an ensemble has, the more tolerant the ensemble is of host failures. Also, run an odd number of machines. In ZooKeeper, an even number of peers is supported, but it is normally not used because an even sized ensemble requires, proportionally, more peers to form a quorum than an odd sized ensemble requires. For example, an ensemble with 4 peers requires 3 to form a quorum, while an ensemble with 5 also requires 3 to form a quorum. Thus, an ensemble of 5 allows 2 peers to fail, and thus is more fault tolerant than the ensemble of 4, which allows only 1 down peer.
Give each ZooKeeper server around 1GB of RAM, and if possible, its own dedicated disk (A dedicated disk is the best thing you can do to ensure a performant ZooKeeper ensemble). For very heavily loaded clusters, run ZooKeeper servers on separate machines from RegionServers (DataNodes and TaskTrackers).
For example, to have HBase manage a ZooKeeper quorum on
nodes rs{1,2,3,4,5}.example.com, bound to
port 2222 (the default is 2181) ensure
HBASE_MANAGE_ZK is commented out or set to
true in
and then edit
conf/hbase-site.xml and set
hbase.zookeeper.property.clientPort and
hbase.zookeeper.quorum. You should also set
hbase.zookeeper.property.dataDir to other than
the default as the default has ZooKeeper persist data under
/tmp which is often cleared on system
restart. In the example below we have ZooKeeper persist to
<configuration> ... <property> <name>hbase.zookeeper.property.clientPort</name> <value>2222</value> <description>Property from ZooKeeper's config zoo.cfg. The port at which the clients will connect. </description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.zookeeper.quorum</name> <value>rs1.example.com,rs2.example.com,rs3.example.com,rs4.example.com,rs5.example.com</value> <description>Comma separated list of servers in the ZooKeeper Quorum. For example, "host1.mydomain.com,host2.mydomain.com,host3.mydomain.com". By default this is set to localhost for local and pseudo-distributed modes of operation. For a fully-distributed setup, this should be set to a full list of ZooKeeper quorum servers. If HBASE_MANAGES_ZK is set in hbase-env.sh this is the list of servers which we will start/stop ZooKeeper on. </description> </property> <property> <name>hbase.zookeeper.property.dataDir</name> <value>/usr/local/zookeeper</value> <description>Property from ZooKeeper's config zoo.cfg. The directory where the snapshot is stored. </description> </property> ... </configuration>
Be sure to set up the data dir cleaner described under Zookeeper Maintenance else you could have 'interesting' problems a couple of months in; i.e. zookeeper could start dropping sessions if it has to run through a directory of hundreds of thousands of logs which is wont to do around leader reelection time -- a process rare but run on occasion whether because a machine is dropped or happens to hiccup.
To point HBase at an existing ZooKeeper cluster, one that
is not managed by HBase, set
conf/hbase-env.sh to false
... # Tell HBase whether it should manage its own instance of Zookeeper or not. export HBASE_MANAGES_ZK=false
Next set ensemble locations
and client port, if non-standard, in
hbase-site.xml, or add a suitably
zoo.cfg to HBase's
CLASSPATH. HBase will prefer the
configuration found in
zoo.cfg over any
settings in
When HBase manages ZooKeeper, it will start/stop the ZooKeeper servers as a part of the regular start/stop scripts. If you would like to run ZooKeeper yourself, independent of HBase start/stop, you would do the following
${HBASE_HOME}/bin/hbase-daemons.sh {start,stop} zookeeper
Note that you can use HBase in this manner to spin up a
ZooKeeper cluster, unrelated to HBase. Just make sure to set
HBASE_MANAGES_ZK to
if you want it to stay up across HBase restarts so that when
HBase shuts down, it doesn't take ZooKeeper down with it.
For more information about running a distinct ZooKeeper cluster, see the ZooKeeper Getting Started Guide. Additionally, see the ZooKeeper Wiki or the ZooKeeper documentation for more information on ZooKeeper sizing.
Newer releases of Apache HBase (>= 0.92) will support connecting to a ZooKeeper Quorum that supports SASL authentication (which is available in Zookeeper versions 3.4.0 or later).
This describes how to set up HBase to mutually authenticate with a ZooKeeper Quorum. ZooKeeper/HBase mutual authentication (HBASE-2418) is required as part of a complete secure HBase configuration (HBASE-3025). For simplicity of explication, this section ignores additional configuration required (Secure HDFS and Coprocessor configuration). It's recommended to begin with an HBase-managed Zookeeper configuration (as opposed to a standalone Zookeeper quorum) for ease of learning.
You need to have a working Kerberos KDC setup. For
$HOST that will run a ZooKeeper
server, you should have a principle
zookeeper/$HOST. For each such host,
add a service key (using the
kadmin or
kadmin.local tool's
command) for
zookeeper/$HOST and copy
this file to
$HOST, and make it
readable only to the user that will run zookeeper on
$HOST. Note the location of this file,
which we will use below as
Similarly, for each
$HOST that will run
an HBase server (master or regionserver), you should
have a principle:
hbase/$HOST. For each
host, add a keytab file called
hbase.keytab containing a service
key for
hbase/$HOST, copy this file to
$HOST, and make it readable only to the
user that will run an HBase service on
$HOST. Note the location of this file,
which we will use below as
Each user who will be an HBase client should also be
given a Kerberos principal. This principal should
usually have a password assigned to it (as opposed to,
as with the HBase servers, a keytab file) which only
this user knows. The client's principal's
maxrenewlife should be set so that it can
be renewed enough so that the user can complete their
HBase client processes. For example, if a user runs a
long-running HBase client process that takes at most 3
days, we might create this user's principal within
kadmin with:
addprinc -maxrenewlife
3days. The Zookeeper client and server
libraries manage their own ticket refreshment by
running threads that wake up periodically to do the
On each host that will run an HBase client
hbase shell), add the following
file to the HBase home directory's
Client { com.sun.security.auth.module.Krb5LoginModule required useKeyTab=false useTicketCache=true; };
We'll refer to this JAAS configuration file as
$CLIENT_CONF below.
On each node that will run a zookeeper, a
master, or a regionserver, create a JAAS
configuration file in the conf directory of the node's
HBASE_HOME directory that looks like the
Server { com.sun.security.auth.module.Krb5LoginModule required useKeyTab=true keyTab="$PATH_TO_ZOOKEEPER_KEYTAB" storeKey=true useTicketCache=false principal="zookeeper/$HOST"; }; Client { com.sun.security.auth.module.Krb5LoginModule required useKeyTab=true useTicketCache=false keyTab="$PATH_TO_HBASE_KEYTAB" principal="hbase/$HOST"; };where the
$PATH_TO_HBASE_KEYTAB and
$PATH_TO_ZOOKEEPER_KEYTAB files are what
you created above, and
$HOST is the hostname for that
Server section will be used by
the Zookeeper quorum server, while the
Client section will be used by the HBase
master and regionservers. The path to this file should
be substituted for the text
in the
listing below.
The path to this file should be substituted for the
$CLIENT_CONF in the
hbase-env.sh listing below.
Modify your
hbase-env.sh to include the
export HBASE_OPTS="-Djava.security.auth.login.config=$CLIENT_CONF" export HBASE_MANAGES_ZK=true export HBASE_ZOOKEEPER_OPTS="-Djava.security.auth.login.config=$HBASE_SERVER_CONF" export HBASE_MASTER_OPTS="-Djava.security.auth.login.config=$HBASE_SERVER_CONF" export HBASE_REGIONSERVER_OPTS="-Djava.security.auth.login.config=$HBASE_SERVER_CONF"where
$HBASE_SERVER_CONF and
$CLIENT_CONF are the full paths to the
JAAS configuration files created above.
Modify your
hbase-site.xml on each node
that will run zookeeper, master or regionserver to contain:
<configuration> <property> <name>hbase.zookeeper.quorum</name> <value>$ZK_NODES</value> </property> <property> <name>hbase.cluster.distributed</name> <value>true</value> </property> <property> <name>hbase.zookeeper.property.authProvider.1</name> <value>org.apache.zookeeper.server.auth.SASLAuthenticationProvider</value> </property> <property> <name>hbase.zookeeper.property.kerberos.removeHostFromPrincipal</name> <value>true</value> </property> <property> <name>hbase.zookeeper.property.kerberos.removeRealmFromPrincipal</name> <value>true</value> </property> </configuration>
$ZK_NODES is the
comma-separated list of hostnames of the Zookeeper
Quorum hosts.
Start your hbase cluster by running one or more of the following set of commands on the appropriate hosts:
bin/hbase zookeeper start bin/hbase master start bin/hbase regionserver start
Add a JAAS configuration file that looks like:
Client { com.sun.security.auth.module.Krb5LoginModule required useKeyTab=true useTicketCache=false keyTab="$PATH_TO_HBASE_KEYTAB" principal="hbase/$HOST"; };
where the
$PATH_TO_HBASE_KEYTAB is the keytab
created above for HBase services to run on this host, and
$HOST is the
hostname for that node. Put this in the HBase home's
configuration directory. We'll refer to this file's
full pathname as
$HBASE_SERVER_CONF below.
Modify your hbase-env.sh to include the following:
export HBASE_OPTS="-Djava.security.auth.login.config=$CLIENT_CONF" export HBASE_MANAGES_ZK=false export HBASE_MASTER_OPTS="-Djava.security.auth.login.config=$HBASE_SERVER_CONF" export HBASE_REGIONSERVER_OPTS="-Djava.security.auth.login.config=$HBASE_SERVER_CONF"
Modify your
hbase-site.xml on each node
that will run a master or regionserver to contain:
<configuration> <property> <name>hbase.zookeeper.quorum</name> <value>$ZK_NODES</value> </property> <property> <name>hbase.cluster.distributed</name> <value>true</value> </property> </configuration>
$ZK_NODES is the
comma-separated list of hostnames of the Zookeeper
Quorum hosts.
Add a
zoo.cfg for each Zookeeper Quorum host containing:
authProvider.1=org.apache.zookeeper.server.auth.SASLAuthenticationProvider kerberos.removeHostFromPrincipal=true kerberos.removeRealmFromPrincipal=true
Also on each of these hosts, create a JAAS configuration file containing:
Server { com.sun.security.auth.module.Krb5LoginModule required useKeyTab=true keyTab="$PATH_TO_ZOOKEEPER_KEYTAB" storeKey=true useTicketCache=false principal="zookeeper/$HOST"; };
$HOST is the hostname of each
Quorum host. We will refer to the full pathname of
this file as
$ZK_SERVER_CONF below.
Start your Zookeepers on each Zookeeper Quorum host with:
SERVER_JVMFLAGS="-Djava.security.auth.login.config=$ZK_SERVER_CONF" bin/zkServer start
Start your HBase cluster by running one or more of the following set of commands on the appropriate nodes:
bin/hbase master start bin/hbase regionserver start
If the configuration above is successful, you should see something similar to the following in your Zookeeper server logs:
11/12/05 22:43:39 INFO zookeeper.Login: successfully logged in. 11/12/05 22:43:39 INFO server.NIOServerCnxnFactory: binding to port 0.0.0.0/0.0.0.0:2181 11/12/05 22:43:39 INFO zookeeper.Login: TGT refresh thread started. 11/12/05 22:43:39 INFO zookeeper.Login: TGT valid starting at: Mon Dec 05 22:43:39 UTC 2011 11/12/05 22:43:39 INFO zookeeper.Login: TGT expires: Tue Dec 06 22:43:39 UTC 2011 11/12/05 22:43:39 INFO zookeeper.Login: TGT refresh sleeping until: Tue Dec 06 18:36:42 UTC 2011 .. 11/12/05 22:43:59 INFO auth.SaslServerCallbackHandler: Successfully authenticated client: firstname.lastname@example.com; email@example.com. 11/12/05 22:43:59 INFO auth.SaslServerCallbackHandler: Setting authorizedID: hbase 11/12/05 22:43:59 INFO server.ZooKeeperServer: adding SASL authorization for authorizationID: hbase
On the Zookeeper client side (HBase master or regionserver), you should see something similar to the following:
11/12/05 22:43:59 INFO zookeeper.ZooKeeper: Initiating client connection, connectString=ip-10-166-175-249.us-west-1.compute.internal:2181 sessionTimeout=180000 watcher=master:60000 11/12/05 22:43:59 INFO zookeeper.ClientCnxn: Opening socket connection to server /10.166.175.249:2181 11/12/05 22:43:59 INFO zookeeper.RecoverableZooKeeper: The identifier of this process is 14851@ip-10-166-175-249 11/12/05 22:43:59 INFO zookeeper.Login: successfully logged in. 11/12/05 22:43:59 INFO client.ZooKeeperSaslClient: Client will use GSSAPI as SASL mechanism. 11/12/05 22:43:59 INFO zookeeper.Login: TGT refresh thread started. 11/12/05 22:43:59 INFO zookeeper.ClientCnxn: Socket connection established to ip-10-166-175-249.us-west-1.compute.internal/10.166.175.249:2181, initiating session 11/12/05 22:43:59 INFO zookeeper.Login: TGT valid starting at: Mon Dec 05 22:43:59 UTC 2011 11/12/05 22:43:59 INFO zookeeper.Login: TGT expires: Tue Dec 06 22:43:59 UTC 2011 11/12/05 22:43:59 INFO zookeeper.Login: TGT refresh sleeping until: Tue Dec 06 18:30:37 UTC 2011 11/12/05 22:43:59 INFO zookeeper.ClientCnxn: Session establishment complete on server ip-10-166-175-249.us-west-1.compute.internal/10.166.175.249:2181, sessionid = 0x134106594320000, negotiated timeout = 180000
git clone git://git.apache.org/hbase.git cd hbase mvn clean test -Dtest=TestZooKeeperACLThen configure HBase as described above. Manually edit target/cached_classpath.txt (see below)..
bin/hbase zookeeper & bin/hbase master & bin/hbase regionserver &
You must override the standard hadoop-core jar file from the
file with the version containing the HADOOP-7070 fix. You can use the following script to do this:
echo `find ~/.m2 -name "*hadoop-core*7070*SNAPSHOT.jar"` ':' `cat target/cached_classpath.txt` | sed 's/ //g' > target/tmp.txt mv target/tmp.txt target/cached_classpath.txt
[30] For the full list of ZooKeeper configurations, see
zoo.cfg. HBase does not ship
with a
zoo.cfg so you will need to browse
conf directory in an appropriate
ZooKeeper download.
Table of Contents
Feature Branches are easy to make. You do not have to be a committer to make one. Just request the name of your branch be added to JIRA up on the developer's mailing list and a committer will add it for you. Thereafter you can file issues against your feature branch in Apache HBase (TM) JIRA. Your code you keep elsewhere -- it should be public so it can be observed -- and you can update dev mailing list on progress. When the feature is ready for commit, 3 +1s from committers will get your feature merged[31]
The below policy is something we put in place 09/2012. It is a suggested policy rather than a hard requirement. We want to try it first to see if it works before we cast it in stone.
Apache HBase is made of components. Components have one or more Section 17.2.1, "Component Owner"s. See the 'Description' field on the components JIRA page for who the current owners are by component.
Patches that fit within the scope of a single Apache HBase component require, at least, a +1 by one of the component's owners before commit. If owners are absent -- busy or otherwise -- two +1s by non-owners will suffice.
Patches that span components need at least two +1s before they can be committed, preferably +1s by owners of components touched by the x-component patch (TODO: This needs tightening up but I think fine for first pass).
Any -1 on a patch by anyone vetos a patch; it cannot be committed until the justification for the -1 is addressed.
Component owners are listed in the description field on this Apache HBase JIRA components page. The owners are listed in the 'Description' field rather than in the 'Component Lead' field because the latter only allows us list one individual whereas it is encouraged that components have multiple owners.
Owners are volunteers who are (usually, but not necessarily) expert in their component domain and may have an agenda on how they think their Apache HBase component should evolve.
Duties include:
Owners will try and review patches that land within their component's scope.
If applicable, if an owner has an agenda, they will publish their goals or the design toward which they are driving their component
If you would like to be volunteer as a component owner, just write the dev list and we'll sign you up. Owners do not need to be committers.
A.1. General
When should I use HBase?
See the Section 9.1, "Overview" in the Architecture chapter.
Are there other HBase FAQs?
See the FAQ that is up on the wiki, HBase Wiki FAQ.
Does HBase support SQL?
Not really. SQL-ish support for HBase via Hive is in development, however Hive is based on MapReduce which is not generally suitable for low-latency requests. See the Chapter 5, Data Model section for examples on the HBase client.
How can I find examples of NoSQL/HBase?
See the link to the BigTable paper in Appendix F, Other Information About HBase in the appendix, as well as the other papers.
What is the history of HBase?
A.2. Architecture
How does HBase handle Region-RegionServer assignment and locality?
A.3. Configuration
How can I get started with my first cluster?
Where can I learn about the rest of the configuration options?
A.4. Schema Design / Data Access
How should I design my schema in HBase?
See Chapter 5, Data Model and Chapter 6, HBase and Schema Design
How can I store (fill in the blank) in HBase?
How can I handle secondary indexes in HBase?
See Section 6.9, " Secondary Indexes and Alternate Query Paths "
Can I change a table's rowkeys?
This is a very common quesiton. You can't. See Section 6.3.5, "Immutability of Rowkeys".
What APIs does HBase support?
See Chapter 5, Data Model, Section 9.3, "Client" and Section 10.1, "Non-Java Languages Talking to the JVM".
A.5. MapReduce
How can I use MapReduce with HBase?
A.6. Performance and Troubleshooting
How can I improve HBase cluster performance?
How can I troubleshoot my HBase cluster?
See Chapter 12, Troubleshooting and Debugging Apache HBase (TM).
A.7. Amazon EC2
I am running HBase on Amazon EC2 and...
EC2 issues are a special case. See Troubleshooting Section 12.12, "Amazon EC2" and Performance Section 11.11, "Amazon EC2" sections.
A.8. Operations
How do I manage my HBase cluster?
How do I back up my HBase cluster?
A.9. HBase in Action
Where can I find interesting videos and presentations on HBase?
Table of Contents
HBaseFsck (hbck) is a tool for checking for region consistency and table integrity problems and repairing a corrupted HBase. It works in two basic modes -- a read-only inconsistency identifying mode and a multi-phase read-write repair mode.
$ ./bin/hbase hbck
At the end of the commands output it prints OK or tells you the number of INCONSISTENCIES
present. You may also want to run run hbck a few times because some inconsistencies can be
transient (e.g. cluster is starting up or a region is splitting). Operationally you may want to run
hbck regularly and setup alert (e.g. via nagios) if it repeatedly reports inconsistencies .
A run of hbck will report a list of inconsistencies along with a brief description of the regions and
tables affected. The using the
-details option will report more details including a representative
listing of all the splits present in all the tables.
$ ./bin/hbase hbck -detailsIf you just want to know if some tables are corrupted, you can limit hbck to identify inconsistencies in only specific tables. For example the following command would only attempt to check table TableFoo and TableBar. The benefit is that hbck will run in less time.
$ ./bin/hbase hbck TableFoo TableBar
If after several runs, inconsistencies continue to be reported, you may have encountered a corruption. These should be rare, but in the event they occur newer versions of HBase include the hbck tool enabled with automatic repair options.
There are two invariants that when violated create inconsistencies in HBase:
Repairs generally work in three phases -- a read-only information gathering phase that identifies
inconsistencies, a table integrity repair phase that restores the table integrity invariant, and then
finally a region consistency repair phase that restores the region consistency invariant.
Starting from version 0.90.0, hbck could detect region consistency problems report on a subset
of possible table integrity problems. It also included the ability to automatically fix the most
common inconsistency, region assignment and deployment consistency problems. This repair
could be done by using the
-fix command line option. These problems close regions if they are
open on the wrong server or on multiple region servers and also assigns regions to region
servers if they are not open.
Starting from HBase versions 0.90.7, 0.92.2 and 0.94.0, several new command line options are introduced to aid repairing a corrupted HBase. This hbck sometimes goes by the nickname "uberhbck". Each particular version of uber hbck is compatible with the HBase's of the same major version (0.90.7 uberhbck can repair a 0.90.4). However, versions <=0.90.6 and versions <=0.92.1 may require restarting the master or failing over to a backup master.
When repairing a corrupted HBase, it is best to repair the lowest risk inconsistencies first. These are generally region consistency repairs -- localized single region repairs, that only modify in-memory data, ephemeral zookeeper data, or patch holes in the META table. Region consistency requires that the HBase instance has the state of the region's data in HDFS (.regioninfo files), the region's row in the .META. table., and region's deployment/assignments on region servers and the master in accordance. Options for repairing region consistency include:
-fixAssignments (equivalent to the 0.90
-fix option) repairs unassigned, incorrectly
assigned or multiply assigned regions.
-fixMeta which removes meta rows when corresponding regions are not present in
HDFS and adds new meta rows if they regions are present in HDFS while not in META.
To fix deployment and assignment problems you can run this command:
$ ./bin/hbase hbck -fixAssignmentsTo fix deployment and assignment problems as well as repairing incorrect meta rows you can run this command:.
$ ./bin/hbase hbck -fixAssignments -fixMetaThere are a few classes of table integrity problems that are low risk repairs. The first two are degenerate (startkey == endkey) regions and backwards regions (startkey > endkey). These are automatically handled by sidelining the data to a temporary directory (/hbck/xxxx). The third low-risk class is hdfs region holes. This can be repaired by using the:
-fixHdfsHoles option for fabricating new empty regions on the file system.
If holes are detected you can use -fixHdfsHoles and should include -fixMeta and -fixAssignments to make the new region consistent.
$ ./bin/hbase hbck -fixAssignments -fixMeta -fixHdfsHolesSince this is a common operation, we've added a the
-repairHoles flag that is equivalent to the
previous command:
$ ./bin/hbase hbck -repairHolesIf inconsistencies still remain after these steps, you most likely have table integrity problems related to orphaned or overlapping regions.
hbck -details
run so that you isolate repairs attempts only upon problems the checks identify. Because this is
riskier, there are safeguard that should be used to limit the scope of the repairs.
WARNING: This is a relatively new and have only been tested on online but idle HBase instances
(no reads/writes). Use at your own risk in an active production environment!
The options for repairing table integrity violations include:
-fixHdfsOrphans option for "adopting" a region directory that is missing a region
metadata file (the .regioninfo file).
-fixHdfsOverlaps ability for fixing overlapping regions
-maxMerge <n> maximum number of overlapping regions to merge
-sidelineBigOverlaps if more than maxMerge regions are overlapping, sideline attempt
to sideline the regions overlapping with the most other regions.
-maxOverlapsToSideline <n> if sidelining large overlapping regions, sideline at most n
-repair includes all the region consistency options and only the hole repairing table
integrity options.
$ ./bin/hbase hbck -repair TableFoo TableBar
-fixMetaOnly option that can try to fix meta assignments.
$ ./bin/hbase hbck -fixMetaOnly -fixAssignments
-fixVersionFile option to fabricating a new HBase version file. This assumes that
the version of hbck you are running is the appropriate version for the HBase cluster.
$ ./bin/hbase org.apache.hadoop.hbase.util.hbck.OfflineMetaRepairNOTE: This tool is not as clever as uberhbck but can be used to bootstrap repairs that uberhbck can complete. If the tool succeeds you should be able to start hbase and run online repairs if necessary.
Once a region is split, the offline parent will be cleaned up automatically. Sometimes, daughter regions
are split again before their parents are cleaned up. HBase can clean up parents in the right order. However,
there could be some lingering offline split parents sometimes. They are in META, in HDFS, and not deployed.
But HBase can't clean them up. In this case, you can use the
-fixSplitParents option to reset
them in META to be online and not split. Therefore, hbck can merge them with other regions if fixing
overlapping regions option is used.
This option should not normally be used, and it is not in
Table of Contents
HBase includes a tool to test compression is set up properly.
To run it, type
/bin/hbase org.apache.hadoop.hbase.util.CompressionTest.
This will emit usage on how to run the tool.
Be aware that the regionserver caches the result of the compression check it runs ahead of each region open. This means that you will have to restart the regionserver for it to notice that you have fixed any codec issues.
To have a RegionServer test a set of codecs and fail-to-start if any
code is missing or misinstalled, add the configuration
to your
hbase-site.xml with a value of
codecs to test on startup. For example if the
value is
lzo,gz and if lzo is not present
or improperly installed, the misconfigured RegionServer will fail
to start.
Administrators might make use of this facility to guard against the case where a new server is added to cluster but the cluster requires install of a particular coded.
Unfortunately, HBase cannot ship with LZO because of the licensing issues; HBase is Apache-licensed, LZO is GPL. Therefore LZO install is to be done post-HBase install. See the Using LZO Compression wiki page for how to make LZO work with HBase.
A common problem users run into when using LZO is that while initial setup of the cluster runs smooth, a month goes by and some sysadmin goes to add a machine to the cluster only they'll have forgotten to do the LZO fixup on the new machine. In versions since HBase 0.90.0, we should fail in a way that makes it plain what the problem is, but maybe not.
See Section C.2, "
for a feature to help protect against failed LZO install.
GZIP will generally compress better than LZO though slower. For some setups, better compression may be preferred. Java will use java's GZIP unless the native Hadoop libs are available on the CLASSPATH; in this case it will use native compressors instead (If the native libs are NOT present, you will see lots of Got brand-new compressor reports in your logs; see ???).
If snappy is installed, HBase can make use of it (courtesy of hadoop-snappy [32]).
Build and install snappy on all nodes of your cluster (see below)
Use CompressionTest to verify snappy support is enabled and the libs can be loaded ON ALL NODES of your cluster:
$ hbase org.apache.hadoop.hbase.util.CompressionTest hdfs://host/path/to/hbase snappy
Create a column family with snappy compression and verify it in the hbase shell:
$ hbase> create 't1', { NAME => 'cf1', COMPRESSION => 'SNAPPY' } hbase> describe 't1'
In the output of the "describe" command, you need to ensure it lists "COMPRESSION => 'SNAPPY'"
You will find the snappy library file under the .libs directory from your Snappy build (For example /home/hbase/snappy-1.0.5/.libs/). The file is called libsnappy.so.1.x.x where 1.x.x is the version of the snappy code you are building. You can either copy this file into your hbase directory under libsnappy.so name, or simply create a symbolic link to it.
The second file you need is the hadoop native library. You will find this file in your hadoop installation directory under lib/native/Linux-amd64-64/ or lib/native/Linux-i386-32/. The file you are looking for is libhadoop.so.1.x.x. Again, you can simply copy this file or link to it, under the name libhadoop.so.
At the end of the installation, you should have both libsnappy.so and libhadoop.so links or files present into lib/native/Linux-amd64-64 or into lib/native/Linux-i386-32
To point hbase at snappy support, in hbase-env.sh set
export HBASE_LIBRARY_PATH=/pathtoyourhadoop/lib/native/Linux-amd64-64
/pathtoyourhadoop/lib/native/Linux-amd64-64 you should have something like:
libsnappy.a libsnappy.so libsnappy.so.1 libsnappy.so.1.1.2
A frequent question on the dist-list is how to change compression schemes for ColumnFamilies. This is actually quite simple, and can be done via an alter command. Because the compression scheme is encoded at the block-level in StoreFiles, the table does not need to be re-created and the data does not copied somewhere else. Just make sure the old codec is still available until you are sure that all of the old StoreFiles have been compacted.
[32] See Alejandro's note up on the list on difference between Snappy in Hadoop and Snappy in HBase
TODO: Describe how YCSB is poor for putting up a decent cluster load.
TODO: Describe setup of YCSB for HBase
Ted Dunning redid YCSB so it's mavenized and added facility for verifying workloads. See Ted Dunning's YCSB.
Table of Contents
Note: this feature was introduced in HBase 0.92
We found it necessary to revise the HFile format after encountering high memory usage and slow startup times caused by large Bloom filters and block indexes in the region server. Bloom filters can get as large as 100 MB per HFile, which adds up to 2 GB when aggregated over 20 regions. Block indexes can grow as large as 6 GB in aggregate size over the same set of regions. A region is not considered opened until all of its block index data is loaded. Large Bloom filters produce a different performance problem: the first get request that requires a Bloom filter lookup will incur the latency of loading the entire Bloom filter bit array.
To speed up region server startup we break Bloom filters and block indexes into multiple blocks and write those blocks out as they fill up, which also reduces the HFile writer's memory footprint. In the Bloom filter case, "filling up a block" means accumulating enough keys to efficiently utilize a fixed-size bit array, and in the block index case we accumulate an "index block" of the desired size. Bloom filter blocks and index blocks (we call these "inline blocks") become interspersed with data blocks, and as a side effect we can no longer rely on the difference between block offsets to determine data block length, as it was done in version 1.
HFile is a low-level file format by design, and it should not deal with application-specific details such as Bloom filters, which are handled at StoreFile level. Therefore, we call Bloom filter blocks in an HFile "inline" blocks. We also supply HFile with an interface to write those inline blocks.
Another format modification aimed at reducing the region server startup time is to use a contiguous "load-on-open" section that has to be loaded in memory at the time an HFile is being opened. Currently, as an HFile opens, there are separate seek operations to read the trailer, data/meta indexes, and file info. To read the Bloom filter, there are two more seek operations for its "data" and "meta" portions. In version 2, we seek once to read the trailer and seek again to read everything else we need to open the file from a contiguous block.
As we will be discussing the changes we are making to the HFile format, it is useful to give a short overview of the previous (HFile version 1) format. An HFile in the existing format is structured as follows: [33]
The block index in version 1 is very straightforward. For each entry, it contains:
Offset (long)
Uncompressed size (int)
Key (a serialized byte array written using Bytes.writeByteArray)
Key length as a variable-length integer (VInt)
Key bytes
The number of entries in the block index is stored in the fixed file trailer, and has to be passed in to the method that reads the block index. One of the limitations of the block index in version 1 is that it does not provide the compressed size of a block, which turns out to be necessary for decompression. Therefore, the HFile reader has to infer this compressed size from the offset difference between blocks. We fix this limitation in version 2, where we store on-disk block size instead of uncompressed size, and get uncompressed size from the block header.
The version of HBase introducing the above features reads both version 1 and 2 HFiles, but only writes version 2 HFiles. A version 2 HFile is structured as follows:
In the version 2 every block in the data section contains the following fields:
8 bytes: Block type, a sequence of bytes equivalent to version 1's "magic records". Supported block types are:
DATA – data blocks
LEAF_INDEX – leaf-level index blocks in a multi-level-block-index
BLOOM_CHUNK – Bloom filter chunks
META – meta blocks (not used for Bloom filters in version 2 anymore)
INTERMEDIATE_INDEX – intermediate-level index blocks in a multi-level blockindex
ROOT_INDEX – root>level index blocks in a multi>level block index
FILE_INFO – the "file info" block, a small key>value map of metadata
BLOOM_META – a Bloom filter metadata block in the load>on>open section
TRAILER – a fixed>size file trailer. As opposed to the above, this is not an HFile v2 block but a fixed>size (for each HFile version) data structure
INDEX_V1 – this block type is only used for legacy HFile v1 block
Compressed size of the block's data, not including the header (int).
Can be used for skipping the current data block when scanning HFile data.
Uncompressed size of the block's data, not including the header (int)
This is equal to the compressed size if the compression algorithm is NON
File offset of the previous block of the same type (long)
Can be used for seeking to the previous data/index block
Compressed data (or uncompressed data if the compression algorithm is NONE).
The above format of blocks is used in the following HFile sections:
Scanned block section. The section is named so because it contains all data blocks that need to be read when an HFile is scanned sequentially. Also contains leaf block index and Bloom chunk blocks.
Non-scanned block section. This section still contains unified-format v2 blocks but it does not have to be read when doing a sequential scan. This section contains "meta" blocks and intermediate-level index blocks.
We are supporting "meta" blocks in version 2 the same way they were supported in version 1, even though we do not store Bloom filter data in these blocks anymore.
There are three types of block indexes in HFile version 2, stored in two different formats (root and non-root):
Data index — version 2 multi-level block index, consisting of:
Version 2 root index, stored in the data block index section of the file
Optionally, version 2 intermediate levels, stored in the non%root format in the data index section of the file. Intermediate levels can only be present if leaf level blocks are present
Optionally, version 2 leaf levels, stored in the non%root format inline with data blocks
Meta index — version 2 root index format only, stored in the meta index section of the file
Bloom index — version 2 root index format only, stored in the "load-on-open" section as part of Bloom filter metadata.
This format applies to:
Root level of the version 2 data index
Entire meta and Bloom indexes in version 2, which are always single-level.
A version 2 root index block is a sequence of entries of the following format, similar to entries of a version 1 block index, but storing on-disk size instead of uncompressed size.
Offset (long)
This offset may point to a data block or to a deeper>level index block.
On-disk size (int)
Key (a serialized byte array stored using Bytes.writeByteArray)
Key (VInt)
Key bytes
A single-level version 2 block index consists of just a single root index block. To read a root index block of version 2, one needs to know the number of entries. For the data index and the meta index the number of entries is stored in the trailer, and for the Bloom index it is stored in the compound Bloom filter metadata.
For a multi-level block index we also store the following fields in the root index block in the load-on-open section of the HFile, in addition to the data structure described above:
Middle leaf index block offset
Middle leaf block on-disk size (meaning the leaf index block containing the reference to the "middle" data block of the file)
The index of the mid-key (defined below) in the middle leaf-level block.
These additional fields are used to efficiently retrieve the mid-key of the HFile used in HFile splits, which we define as the first key of the block with a zero-based index of (n – 1) / 2, if the total number of blocks in the HFile is n. This definition is consistent with how the mid-key was determined in HFile version 1, and is reasonable in general, because blocks are likely to be the same size on average, but we don't have any estimates on individual key/value pair sizes.
When writing a version 2 HFile, the total number of data blocks pointed to by every leaf-level index block is kept track of. When we finish writing and the total number of leaf-level blocks is determined, it is clear which leaf-level block contains the mid-key, and the fields listed above are computed. When reading the HFile and the mid-key is requested, we retrieve the middle leaf index block (potentially from the block cache) and get the mid-key value from the appropriate position inside that leaf block.
This format applies to intermediate-level and leaf index blocks of a version 2 multi-level data block index. Every non-root index block is structured as follows.
numEntries: the number of entries (int).
entryOffsets: the "secondary index" of offsets of entries in the block, to facilitate a quick binary search on the key (numEntries + 1 int values). The last value is the total length of all entries in this index block. For example, in a non-root index block with entry sizes 60, 80, 50 the "secondary index" will contain the following int array: {0, 60, 140, 190}.
Entries. Each entry contains:
Offset of the block referenced by this entry in the file (long)
On>disk size of the referenced block (int)
Key. The length can be calculated from entryOffsets.
In contrast with version 1, in a version 2 HFile Bloom filter metadata is stored in the load-on-open section of the HFile for quick startup.
A compound Bloom filter.
Bloom filter version = 3 (int). There used to be a DynamicByteBloomFilter class that had the Bloom filter version number 2
The total byte size of all compound Bloom filter chunks (long)
Number of hash functions (int
Type of hash functions (int)
The total key count inserted into the Bloom filter (long)
The maximum total number of keys in the Bloom filter (long)
The number of chunks (int)
Comparator class used for Bloom filter keys, a UTF>8 encoded string stored using Bytes.writeByteArray
Bloom block index in the version 2 root block index format
The file info block is a serialized HbaseMapWritable (essentially a map from byte arrays to byte arrays) with the following keys, among others. StoreFile-level logic adds more keys to this.
The last key of the file (byte array)
The average key length in the file (int)
The average value length in the file (int)
File info format did not change in version 2. However, we moved the file info to the final section of the file, which can be loaded as one block at the time the HFile is being opened. Also, we do not store comparator in the version 2 file info anymore. Instead, we store it in the fixed file trailer. This is because we need to know the comparator at the time of parsing the load-on-open section of the HFile.
The following table shows common and different fields between fixed file trailers in versions 1 and 2. Note that the size of the trailer is different depending on the version, so it is "fixed" only within one version. However, the version is always stored as the last four-byte integer in the file.
Version 1
Version 2
File info offset (long)
Data index offset (long)
loadOnOpenOffset (long)
The offset of the section that we need toload when opening the file.
Number of data index entries (int)
metaIndexOffset (long)
This field is not being used by the version 1 reader, so we removed it from version 2.
uncompressedDataIndexSize (long)
The total uncompressed size of the whole data block index, including root-level, intermediate-level, and leaf-level blocks.
Number of meta index entries (int)
Total uncompressed bytes (long)
numEntries (int)
numEntries (long)
Compression codec: 0 = LZO, 1 = GZ, 2 = NONE (int)
The number of levels in the data block index (int)
firstDataBlockOffset (long)
The offset of the first first data block. Used when scanning.
lastDataBlockEnd (long)
The offset of the first byte after the last key/value data block. We don't need to go beyond this offset when scanning.
Version: 1 (int)
Version: 2 (int)
[33] Image courtesy of Lars George, hbase-architecture-101-storage.html.
Table of Contents
Introduction to HBase
Building Real Time Services at Facebook with HBase by Jonathan Gray (Hadoop World 2011).
HBase and Hadoop, Mixing Real-Time and Batch Processing at StumbleUpon by JD Cryans (Hadoop World 2010).
Advanced HBase Schema Design by Lars George (Hadoop World 2011).
Introduction to HBase by Todd Lipcon (Chicago Data Summit 2011).
Getting The Most From Your HBase Install by Ryan Rawson, Jonathan Gray (Hadoop World 2009).
BigTable by Google (2006).
HBase and HDFS Locality by Lars George (2010).
No Relation: The Mixed Blessings of Non-Relational Databases by Ian Varley (2009).
Cloudera's HBase Blog has a lot of links to useful HBase information.
HBase Wiki has a page with a number of presentations.
HBase RefCard from DZone.
HBase: The Definitive Guide by Lars George.
Hadoop: The Definitive Guide by Tom White.
Table of Contents
HBase is a project in the Apache Software Foundation and as such there are responsibilities to the ASF to ensure a healthy project.
See the Apache Development Process page for all sorts of information on how the ASF is structured (e.g., PMC, committers, contributors), to tips on contributing and getting involved, and how open-source works at ASF.
Once a quarter, each project in the ASF portfolio submits a report to the ASF board. This is done by the HBase project lead and the committers. See ASF board reporting for more information.
Table of Contents
HBASE-6449 added support for tracing requests through HBase, using the open source tracing library, HTrace. Setting up tracing is quite simple, however it currently requires some very minor changes to your client code (it would not be very difficult to remove this requirement).
The tracing system works by collecting information in structs called 'Spans'.
It is up to you to choose how you want to receive this information by implementing the
SpanReceiver interface, which defines one method:
public void receiveSpan(Span span);
This method serves as a callback whenever a span is completed. HTrace allows you to use as many SpanReceivers as you want so you can easily send trace information to multiple destinations.
Configure what SpanReceivers you'd like to use by putting a comma separated list of the
fully-qualified class name of classes implementing
SpanReceiver in
hbase-site.xml property:
HBase includes a
HBaseLocalFileSpanReceiver that writes all span
information to local files in a JSON-based format. The
looks in
hbase-site.xml for a
property with a value describing the name of the file to which nodes should write their span information.
If you do not want to use the included
you are encouraged to write your own receiver (take a look at
for an example). If you think others would benefit from your receiver, file a JIRA or send a pull request to
Currently, you must turn on tracing in your client code. To do this, you simply turn on tracing for requests you think are interesting, and turn it off when the request is done.
For example, if you wanted to trace all of your get operations, you change this:
HTable table = new HTable(...); Get get = new Get(...);
Span getSpan = Trace.startSpan("doing get", Sampler.ALWAYS); try { HTable table = new HTable(...); Get get = new Get(...); ... } finally { getSpan.stop(); }
If you wanted to trace half of your 'get' operations, you would pass in:
new ProbabilitySampler(0.5)
in lieu of
Sampler.ALWAYS to
See the HTrace
README for more information on Samplers.