The HBase export
utility dumps the contents of a table to the same HDFS cluster. The dump file is in a Hadoop sequence file format. Exporting data to Hadoop sequence files has merits for data backup, because the Hadoop sequence file format supports several compression types and algorithms. With it we can choose the best compression options to fit our environment.
Like the copytable
utility we mentioned in the previous recipe, export
is configurable with a start and an end timestamp, so that only the data within a specific time frame will be dumped. This feature enables export
to incrementally export an HBase table to HDFS.
HBase export
is also a live backup option. As the cluster is running, there is a risk that edits could be missed during the export process. In this recipe, we will describe how to use the export
utility to export a table to HDFS on the same cluster. We will introduce the import
utility in the next recipe, which is used to...