Hello, I was going nuts over an issue where I would try to delete a single
column but a neighboring column (sorted by the column names in bytes) was
also being deleted because, I found out, the timestamp for the neighbor was
set to 0. Here are some of the columns in the row (taken from the shell
utility)
hbase(main):002:0> get 'mytable',
"\x00\x01\xAA\x50\x8E\xC4\x20\x00\x00\x01\x00\x00\xAC"
COLUMN CELL
t:\x00\x17 timestamp=1351533601998,
value=\x00\x00\x00\x00O\xB2\xDC[
t:\x00\x17\x03\xD7\x...(long name) timestamp=0, value=\x00\x00\x... lots
of binary data....
t:\x03\xD7 timestamp=1351533661458,
value=\x00\x00\x00\x00O\xB9\xD1\xE5
t:\x07\x97 timestamp=1351533721758,
value=\x00\x00\x00\x00O\xBC#\xD0
t:\x0BW timestamp=1351533781738,
value=\x00\x00\x00\x00O\xBD\xB93
I wanted to delete the column "t:\x00\x17" but every time I did, the column
"t:\x00\x17\x03\xD7\x..." would also be deleted so that I'd wind up with:
hbase(main):005:0> get 'mytable',
"\x00\x01\xAA\x50\x8E\xC4\x20\x00\x00\x01\x00\x00\xAC"
COLUMN CELL
t:\x03\xD7 timestamp=1351533661458,
value=\x00\x00\x00\x00O\xB9\xD1\xE5
t:\x07\x97 timestamp=1351533721758,
value=\x00\x00\x00\x00O\xBC#\xD0
t:\x0BW timestamp=1351533781738,
value=\x00\x00\x00\x00O\xBD\xB93
My JAVA code looked like this:
HTableInterface table = factory.createHTableInterface(config,
"mytable".getBytes());
Delete delete = new Delete(HexToBytes("0001AA508EC4200000010000AC"));
delete.deleteColumn("t".getBytes(), new byte[] { (byte) 0x00, (byte) 0x17
});
table.delete(delete);
as I was typing this out, I noticed that the column I didn't want to delete
had a timestamp of 0. I put the column back with a valid timestamp and tried
deleting the original column, and it worked properly. I fixed my code to
always provide a positive timestamp, but my question is, are timestamps set
to 0 valid for storing data in HBase? And if so, then this may be a bug that
needs addressing. Thanks!
