Book Image

HBase Administration Cookbook

By : Yifeng Jiang
Book Image

HBase Administration Cookbook

By: Yifeng Jiang

Overview of this book

As an Open Source distributed big data store, HBase scales to billions of rows, with millions of columns and sits on top of the clusters of commodity machines. If you are looking for a way to store and access a huge amount of data in real-time, then look no further than HBase.HBase Administration Cookbook provides practical examples and simple step-by-step instructions for you to administrate HBase with ease. The recipes cover a wide range of processes for managing a fully distributed, highly available HBase cluster on the cloud. Working with such a huge amount of data means that an organized and manageable process is key and this book will help you to achieve that.The recipes in this practical cookbook start from setting up a fully distributed HBase cluster and moving data into it. You will learn how to use all of the tools for day-to-day administration tasks as well as for efficiently managing and monitoring the cluster to achieve the best performance possible. Understanding the relationship between Hadoop and HBase will allow you to get the best out of HBase so the book will show you how to set up Hadoop clusters, configure Hadoop to cooperate with HBase, and tune its performance.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
HBase Administration Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgement
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Backing up region starting keys


Besides the tables in HBase, we should back up the region starting keys for each table. Region starting keys determine the data distribution in a table, as regions are split by region starting keys. A region is the basic unit for load balancing and metrics gathering in HBase.

There is no need to back up the region starting keys if you are performing full shutdown backups using distcp, because distcp also copies region boundaries to the backup cluster.

But for the live backup options, backing up region starting keys is as important as the table data, which is especially true if your data distribution is difficult to calculate in advance or your regions are manually split. It is important because live backup options, including the CopyTable and Export utilities use the normal HBase client API to restore data in a MapReduce job. The restoring speed can be improved dramatically if we precreate well-split regions before running the restore MapReduce job.

We will...