Null Pointer Exception while using Pig 0.8 and HBase 0.90.0

[Matt Davies]

Hey All,

Running into a problem storing data from a pig script storing results into
HBase.

We are getting the following error:

java.lang.NullPointerException
        at 
org.apache.hadoop.hbase.mapreduce.TableOutputFormat$TableRecordWriter.write(TableOutputFormat.java:126)
        at 
org.apache.hadoop.hbase.mapreduce.TableOutputFormat$TableRecordWriter.write(TableOutputFormat.java:81)
        at 
org.apache.pig.backend.hadoop.hbase.HBaseStorage.putNext(HBaseStorage.java:364)
        at 
org.apache.pig.backend.hadoop.executionengine.mapReduceLayer.PigOutputFormat$PigRecordWriter.write(PigOutputFormat.java:138)
        at 
org.apache.pig.backend.hadoop.executionengine.mapReduceLayer.PigOutputFormat$PigRecordWriter.write(PigOutputFormat.java:97)
        at 
org.apache.hadoop.mapred.MapTask$NewDirectOutputCollector.write(MapTask.java:523)
        at 
org.apache.hadoop.mapreduce.TaskInputOutputContext.write(TaskInputOutputContext.java:80)
        at 
org.apache.pig.backend.hadoop.executionengine.mapReduceLayer.PigMapOnly$Map.collect(PigMapOnly.java:48)
        at 
org.apache.pig.backend.hadoop.executionengine.mapReduceLayer.PigMapBase.runPipeline(PigMapBase.java:238)
        at 
org.apache.pig.backend.hadoop.executionengine.mapReduceLayer.PigMapBase.map(PigMapBase.java:231)
        at 
org.apache.pig.backend.hadoop.executionengine.mapReduceLayer.PigMapBase.map(PigMapBase.java:53)
        at org.apache.hadoop.mapreduce.Mapper.run(Mapper.java:144)
        at org.apache.hadoop.mapred.MapTask.runNewMapper(MapTask.java:639)
        at org.apache.hadoop.mapred.MapTask.run(MapTask.java:315)
        at org.apache.hadoop.mapred.Child$4.run(Child.java:217)
        at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method)
        at javax.security.auth.Subject.doAs(Subject.java:396)
        at 
org.apache.hadoop.security.UserGroupInformation.doAs(UserGroupInformation.java:1063)
        at org.apache.hadoop.mapred.Child.main(Child.java:211)


We are using CDH3b3, and HBase 0.90.0 (from Apache direct). We've
followed the instructions to get pig 0.8.0 to work with CDH3 from
thedatachef(Thanks!)
http://thedatachef.blogspot.com/2011/01/apache-pig-08-with-cloudera-cdh3.html.

The relevant line from the pig script is below. We've applied the
patch to get the "-noWAL" working:

STORE links INTO 'p' USING
org.apache.pig.backend.hadoop.hbase.HBaseStorage('a:t a:t2
a:g','-noWAL');



Anyone know what could be causing this problem?


Thanks in advance,


Matt