Question

Does anyone have an example on how to create an Hbase table with a nested entity?

Example

UserName (string)
SSN  (string)
  + Books (collection)

The books collection would look like this for example

Books

isbn
title
etc...

I cannot find a single example are how to create a table like this. I see many people talk about it, and how it is a best practice in certain scenarios, but I cannot find an example on how to do it anywhere.

Thanks…

Answer 1

Nested entities isn’t an official feature of HBase; it’s just a way some people talk about one usage pattern. In this pattern, you use the fact that “columns” in HBase are really just a big map (a bunch of key/value pairs) to let you to model a dimension of cardinality inside the row by adding one column per “row” of the nested entity.

Schema-wise, you don’t need to do much on the table itself; when you create a table in HBase, you just specify the name & column family (and associated properties), like so (in hbase shell):

hbase:001:0> create 'UserWithBooks', 'cf1'

Then, it’s up to you what you put in it, column wise. You could insert values like:

hbase:002:0> put 'UsersWithBooks', 'userid1234', 'cf1:username', 'my username'
hbase:003:0> put 'UsersWithBooks', 'userid1234', 'cf1:ssn', 'my ssn'
hbase:004:0> put 'UsersWithBooks', 'userid1234', 'cf1:book_id_12345', '<isbn>12345</isbn><title>mary had a little lamb</title>'
hbase:005:0> put 'UsersWithBooks', 'userid1234', 'cf1:book_id_67890', '<isbn>67890</isbn><title>the importance of being earnest</title>'

The column names are totally up to you, and there’s no limit to how many you can have (within reason: see the HBase Reference Guide for more on this). Of course, doing this, you have to do your own legwork re: putting in and getting out values (and you’d probably do it with the java client in a more sophisticated way than I’m doing with these shell commands, they’re just for explanatory purposes). And while you can efficiently scan just a portion of the columns in a table by key (using a column pagination filter), you can’t do much with the contents of the cells other than pull them and parse them elsewhere.

Why would you do this? Probably just if you wanted atomicity around all the nested rows for one parent row. It’s not very common, your best bet is probably to start by modeling them as separate tables, and only move to this approach if you really understand the tradeoffs.