Snappy is a library that uses very effective algorithms for compression and decompression of data. However, the goal is not to maximize compression or compatibility with other compression libraries but to focus on speed and reusable compression. HBase supports different compression mechanisms such as lzo, gzip, or snappy. Gzip comes built in with HBase while lzo/snappy compression needs to be configured separately. When creating a table, you can specify the compression/compression library; HFiles are compressed when written to disk if compression is used.
Once you log in, check the file on this location:
/opt/HbaseB/ hbase-0.98.5-hadoop2/snappy-1.0.5/libs/snappy-java-1.0.4.1.jar → this has a JNL interface to the libsnappy.so.1.x.x which is a native linux-amd64-64 bit lib.
Once you have verified the path and the JAR file, let's do a quick test to make sure the library is performing as expected:
$ hbase org.apache.hadoop.hbase.util.CompressionTest...