Simple HBase ORM

When dealing with data stored in HBase, you are quick to come to a conclusion, that it is extremaly inconvenient to reach to it via HBase native API. It is very verbose and you always need to convert between bytes and simple types – a pain. While I wa…When dealing with data stored in HBase, you are quick to come to a conclusion, that it is extremaly inconvenient to reach to it via HBase native API. It is very verbose and you always need to convert between bytes and simple types – a pain. While I wa…

When dealing with data stored in HBase, you are quick to come to a
conclusion, that it is extremaly inconvenient to reach to it
via HBase native API. It is very verbose and you always need to convert
between bytes and simple types – a pain.

While I was working on a project of mine, I thought, why not to easy
those pains and fetch real objects from HBase.

And that’s how this simplistic, hackish ORM came to life. It is no match
for projects like Kundera
(a JPA compliant solution), or n-orm. Nevertheless, it just suits my needs :)

Project sources are hosted on GitHub: https://github.com/zygm0nt/hbase-annotations

To make use of this, you need to have an entity class with annotations:

  • @Column – with argument specifying column family and column name, ie.
    @Column(“cf:column-name”)
  • @Id – will store row key in this property,
  • and optionaly @Value – for Spring Expression Language, in case you
    need to perform some extraction on the value.

Annotations should be on setter methods.

Now you have your model annotated and ready to be fetched from HBase.

The actual work is done with a service class, that should extend class
BaseHadoopInteraction just as class
SimpleHBaseClient does.

Then it is possible to just call:

Note that there are more methods you can use on BaseHadoopInteraction.
You can also do:

  • scan
  • scan with key ranges
  • delete

What you won’t get from this simple ORM is:

  • automatic object updating,
  • nested objects,
  • saving to HBase – ’cause I didn’t have a need for that,

Hope you’ll find this piece of code useful. If you see room for
improvements while staying in project’s scope – please drop me a
message.

And if you are searching for a full-fledged ORM solution for interacting with HBase, just head
straight to Kundera project website :)

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It is mostly useful for logging your REST traffic. Full HTTP web pages can be huge to log and generally waste your space. I suggest to map all of your REST controllers with the same path in UrlMappings, e.g. /rest/ and configure this plugin with this path.

Here is some simple output just to give you a taste of it.

17:16:00,331 INFO  filters.LogRawRequestInfoFilter  - 17:16:00,340 INFO  filters.LogRawRequestInfoFilter  - 17:16:00,342 INFO  filters.LogGrailsUrlsInfoFilter  - 17:16:00,731 INFO  filters.LogOutputResponseFilter  - >> #1 returned 200, took 405 ms.
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Official plugin information can be found on Grails plugins website here: http://grails.org/plugins/httplogger or you can browse code on github: TouK/grails-httplogger.