James Udiljak created HBASE-28174:
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Summary: DELETE endpoint in REST API does not support deleting
binary row keys/columns
Key: HBASE-28174
URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HBASE-28174
Project: HBase
Issue Type: Bug
Components: REST
Affects Versions: 2.4.17
Reporter: James Udiljak
h2. Notes
This is the first time I have raised an issue in the ASF Jira. Please let me
know if there's anything I need to adjust on the issue to fit in with your
development flow.
I have marked the priority as "blocker" because this issue blocks me as a user
of the HBase REST API from deploying an effective solution for our setup.
Please feel free to change this is Priority has another meaning to you.
I have also chosen 2.4.17 as the affected version because this is the version I
am running, however looking at the source code on GitHub in the default branch,
I think many other versions would be affected.
h2. Description of Issue
The DELETE operation in the [HBase REST
API|https://hbase.apache.org/1.2/apidocs/org/apache/hadoop/hbase/rest/package-summary.html#operation_delete]
requires specifying row keys and column families/offsets in the URI (i.e. as
UTF-8 text). This makes it impossible to specify a delete operation via the
REST API for a binary row key or column family/offset, as single bytes with a
decimal value greater than 127 are not valid in UTF-8.
Percent-encoding these "high" values does not work around the issue, as the
HBase REST API uses Java's {{{{{}URLDecoder.Decode(percentEncodedString,
"UTF-8"){}}}}} function, which replaces any percent-encoded byte in the range
{{%80}} to {{%FF}} with the [replacement
character|https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specials_(Unicode_block)#Replacement_character].
Even if this were not the case, the row-key is ultimately [converted to a byte
array|https://github.com/apache/hbase/blob/rel/2.4.17/hbase-rest/src/main/java/org/apache/hadoop/hbase/rest/RowSpec.java#L60-L100]
using UTF-8 encoding, wherein code points >127 are encoded across multiple
bytes, corrupting the user-supplied row key.
h2. Proposed Solution
I do not believe it is possible to allow encoding of arbitrary bytes in the URL
for the DELETE endpoint without breaking compatibility for any users who may
have been unknowingly UTF-8 encoding their binary row keys. Even if it were
possible, the syntax would likely be terse.
Instead, I propose a new version of the DELETE endpoint that would accept row
keys and column families/offsets in the request _body_ (using Base64 encoding
for the JSON and XML formats, and bare binary for protobuf). This new endpoint
would follow the same conventions as the PUT operations, except that cell
values would not need to be specified (unless the user is performing a
check-and-delete operation).
As an additional benefit, using the request body could potentially allow for
deleting multiple rows in a single request, which would drastically improve the
efficiency of my use case.
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