Doug,
It can be difficult for us to fully understand the perspective of a new
user as far as properly documenting and preventing confusion.
Maybe you could drop a couple suggested lines of javadoc into HBASE-1937
and I'd be happy to expand on them and get that committed asap.
I also think the getKeyValues methods would be useful and provide
additional areas of javadoc that would give more clarity as to how to
properly handle results.
Thanks for your help.
JG
Doug Meil wrote:
Hi Jonathan,
The use-case in question is one column with multiple versions, either to
table-display or plot (Y values over X timestamps), and since the insertion
time into HBase is good enough for the X dimension, we don't need a second
column.
After digging through my test program per your suggestion, I realized the error of my
ways. The history *does* actually come back with the KeyValues when requested. Doh! I
was so focused on this Javadoc comment from getMap() "Map of families to all
versions of its qualifiers and values." that I focused on that method instead of
realizing that the data was right in front of me with KeyValue.
I do think that something like what you suggested "Result.getKeyValues(family,
qualifier)" would still be useful for other versioned use-cases.
I'd still suggest a few blurbs in the Result Javadoc on obtaining history (and that the
methods that return KeyValues contain history when requested). It's "obvious"
now that I understand it, but not so obvious from the existing Javadoc.
I'd be happy to help out with some of this documentation.
Thanks!
-----Original Message-----
From: Jonathan Gray [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Monday, October 26, 2009 12:13 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Question/Suggestion: obtaining older versions of values
Personally, when I need to dig into a complex result with multiple
columns and versions, I iterate over the KeyValues directly rather than
messing with the Map-based return formats from Result.
In your example, are you just returning versions/values for a single
column? Maybe we could add some methods that returned subsets of the
total set of KeyValues (for example, Result.getKeyValues(family,
qualifier) would return all versions of that column in the result in
KeyValue format).
Going to drop a note in HBASE-1937.
JG
Doug Meil wrote:
Hi there-
Question: how does one obtain older versions of values from Result?
As I understand it, the following Scan instance should return the last 5
versions of values for a table, provided that the table is versioned.
Scan scan = new Scan();
scan.setMaxVersions(5);
>From the Javadoc, it looks like what I want is in here (from Result)....
getMap
public
NavigableMap<http://java.sun.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/util/NavigableMap.html?is-external=true><byte[],NavigableMap<http://java.sun.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/util/NavigableMap.html?is-external=true><byte[],NavigableMap<http://java.sun.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/util/NavigableMap.html?is-external=true><Long<http://java.sun.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/lang/Long.html?is-external=true>,byte[]>>>
getMap()
Map of families to all versions of its qualifiers and values.
... but there is a fair amount of gymnastics involved to get the data.
Suggestion: can an example of iterating over this map (and contained maps) be
added to the Javadoc? Versioning is a powerful feature of HBase but using it
isn't obvious in result processing.
Thanks!
Doug Meil
Director of Engineering
[email protected]
