Online table changes is a feature on TRUNK/.92 (dev-list, please comment). However, for .90 and before you need to disable. Long story short, this has to do with the fact that the CFs metadata needs to be propagated to all the regions.
For background, see: http://hbase.apache.org/book.html#architecture ________________________________________ From: Mikael Sitruk [[email protected]] Sent: Thursday, October 27, 2011 3:19 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Adding a column family restriction Hi I have table in which I need to add column family. Nevertheless while trying todo this via API or from shell this operation cannot be complete without disabling the table first. From the business point of view i cannot affort disabling the table. So my questions are: Why such restriction exist? I can understand for deleting a column family by why for creating a new one? Is there a plan to enable this in the future? I have noticed that disabling/enabling table time is different from table to table, what is the factor affecting the disable/enable time (number of regions/volume of the table...)? I also suggest to update the Javadoc to reflect this restriction on the operation (currently no trace of this restriction in the javadoc) Thanks Regards, Mikael.S
