Question

In the HBase shell, the help file shows us that there are several allowable syntaxes for creating a table:

 create 'tableName', {NAME => 'colFamily', VERSIONS => 5 }
 create 'tableName', {NAME => 'cf1'}, {NAME => 'cf2'}
 create 'tableName', 'cf1', 'cf2', 'cf3'
 create 'tableName', 'cf1', {SPLITS => ['10','20','30','40']}

I want to make a table where I specify both a Split and a some table options, like COMPRESSION => ‘SNAPPY’ and VERSIONS, but I can’t seem to figure out the syntax or find useful documentation.

Answer 1

What eventually became clear after experimentation was that the Shell syntax will accept a set of Column Family dictionaries, and the SPLIT dictionary is really its own animal (which makes sense as it modifies the whole table, not just a particular column family.

So an additional useful example to have would be:

 create 'tableName', {NAME => 'colFam', VERSIONS => 2, COMPRESSION => 'SNAPPY'}, 
    {SPLITS => ['333','666','FOO']}

Note that the splits dictionary is separate from the column family dictionary; presumably we could still enter a set of column families and then end with the Splits dictionary.