Due to the in memory locking system, you can take a row lock out on a row that doesn't exist yet. This would allow you to lock a row, do an initial set of mutations then release it.
I would caution against people using the explicit lock system. Waiting for a lock costs scarce system resources, thus you can self-dos yourself if too many clients wait for a row lock. Consider using increment column value or the CAS methods and optimistic locking to avoid long lived explicit locks. On Sep 16, 2009 12:49 PM, "Jeyendran Balakrishnan" < [email protected]> wrote: What does RowLock HTable.lockRow(byte[] row) do when the row does not exist in the table? - return null? - throw an exception - generic IOException, or some subclass, or IOException wrapping another cause ...? - ?? Thanks, jp
