HBase: The Definitive Guide

Appendix A. HBase Configuration Properties

This appendix lists all configuration properties HBase supports with their default values and a description of how they are used. Use it to reference what you need to put into the hbase-site.xml file. The following list is sorted alphabetically for easier lookup. See Configuration for details on how to tune the more important properties.

Note

The description for each property is taken as-is from the hbase-default.xml file. The Type, Default, and Unit fields were added for your convenience.

hbase.balancer.period

Period at which the region balancer runs in the master.

Type: int

Default: 300000 (5 mins)

Unit: milliseconds

hbase.client.keyvalue.maxsize

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.

Type: int

Default: 10485760

Unit: bytes

hbase.client.pause

General client pause value. Used mostly as value to wait before running a retry of a failed get, region lookup, etc.

Type: long

Default: 1000 (1 sec)

Unit: milliseconds

hbase.client.retries.number

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.

Type: int

Default: ...