On Sun, Aug 12, 2012 at 12:52 PM, David Koch <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi Anil, > > Thank you for your advice. >
We don't have a native column typing metadata facility in HBase currently and so there is nothing for the shell to leverage undoing the bytes returned in a scan. HBase in this case just does the lowest common denominator toStringsBinary which will escape the non-printables (An exception is what the shell does when you scan the .META. Here the column types are 'known' and so they are interpreted appropriately). We do have a metadata structure for a column family, HColumnDescriptor. It has a Map into which arbitrary keyvalues can be stuffed. It shouldn't be too hard coming up w/ a convention for typing. The shell could consult the HColumnDescriptor before outputting a cell value to see if the HCD had info on how to format it. St.Ack
