HBase Essentials

The administrative API

So far, we have only talked about the API used by the client to deal with data manipulation features. HBase also unfolds an API for data definition such as operations related to HBase tables, column family and so on. Table creation in HBase implicitly requires the table schema definition and the schemas for all contained column families. Let's start with the data definition API.

The data definition API

In HBase, all data is grouped into tables. The important things required to define a table are column families. The HTableDescriptor class contains the details about an HBase table such as the descriptors of all the column families, type of the table that is catalog table or hbase:meta. It also defines whether the table is read-only ...