Supported Types

The goal of this toolkit is to interact with HBASE from Streams, but we want to ensure that other programs can interact with the HBASE data (via a java program, or via HIVE, or BigSQL, etc) and get predictable ways.

The types supported by HBASE itself are byte[]. In this page, we describe how we convert Streams types to byte arrays, and how we populate streams types from byte[]. We support only a limited set of streams types to ensure we can make these conversions in an understandable way.

Streams to HBASE

Streams type	HBASE Type	Java snippet	note
int64	long	n/a	Only for the increment operator
int64	byte[]	ByteBuffer.allocate(8).putLong(l).toArray
ustring in tuple	byte[]	myString.getBytes(charset)	charset can be supplied as an operator parameter, and defaults to "UTF-8"
ustring, rstring in parameter	byte[]	myString.getBytes(charset)	charset can be supplied as an operator parameter, and defaults to "UTF-8"
rstring in tuple	byte[]	myString.getBytes("UTF-8")
blob	byte[]	myBlob.getInputStream().read(toReturn,0,(int)myBlob.getLength());
streams attribute name	byte[]	attrName.getBytes(charset)	See PutRecord sample for this use.

HBASE to Streams

HBASE type	Streams type	java snippet	note
byte[]	int64	ByteBuffer.wrap(value).getLong()
byte[]	blob	ValueFactory.newBlob(value)
byte[]	rstring	new RString(value)
byte[]	ustring	new String(value, charset)	charset is a character set. It may be passed as an operator parameter