Cloudera Engineering Blog · How-to Posts

How-to: Use the HBase Thrift Interface, Part 1


Those people have two main options: One is the Thrift interface (the more lightweight and hence faster of the two options), and the other is the REST interface (aka Stargate). A REST interface uses HTTP verbs to perform an action. By using HTTP, a REST interface offers a much wider array of languages and programs that can access the interface. (If you’d like more information about the REST interface, you can go to my series of how-to’s about it.)

How-to: Manage HBase Data via Hue

The following post was originally published by the Hue Team at the Hue blog in a slightly different form.

In this post, we’ll take a look at the new Apache HBase Browser App added in Hue 2.5 and which has improved significantly since then. To get the Hue HBase browser, grab Hue via CDH 4.4 packages, via Cloudera Manager, or build it directly from GitHub.

How-to: Write an EL Function in Apache Oozie

When building complex workflows in Apache Oozie, it is often useful to parameterize them so they can be reused or driven from a script, and more easily maintained. The most common method is via ${VAR} variables. For example, instead of specifying the same NameNode for all of your actions in a given workflow, you can specify something like ${myNameNode}, and then in your file, you would define it like myNameNode=hdfs://localhost:8020.

One of the advantages of that approach is that if you want to change the variable (the NameNode in this example), you only have to change it in one place and subsequently all the actions will use the new value. This can be particularly useful when testing in a dev or staging environment where you can simply change a few variables instead of editing the workflow itself.




How-to: Achieve Higher Availability for Hue

Few projects within the Apache Hadoop umbrella have as much end-user visibility as Hue, the open source Web UI that makes Hadoop easier to use. Due to the great number of potential end users, it is useful to add a degree of fault tolerance to your deployment. This how-to describes how to achieve higher availability by placing several Hue instances behind a load balancer.


This tutorial demonstrates how to set up high availability by:

How-to: Use Eclipse with MapReduce in Cloudera’s QuickStart VM

One of the common questions I get from students and developers in my classes relates to IDEs and MapReduce: How do you create a MapReduce project in Eclipse and then debug it?

To answer that question, I have created a screencast showing you how, using Cloudera’s QuickStart VM. The QuickStart VM helps developers get started writing MapReduce code without having to worry about software installs and configuration. Everything is installed and ready to go. You can download the image type that corresponds to your preferred virtualization platform.




Initial State and Goal

How-to: Use the Apache HBase REST Interface, Part 3

This how-to is the third in a series that explores the use of the Apache HBase REST interface. Part 1 covered HBase REST fundamentals, some Python caveats, and table administration. Part 2 showed you how to insert multiple rows simultaneously using XML and JSON. Part 3 below will show how to get multiple rows using XML and JSON.

Getting Rows with XML

Using a GET verb, you can retrieve a single row or a group of rows based on their row keys. (You can read more about the multiple value URL format here.) Here we are going to use the simple wildcard character or asterisk (*) to get all rows that start with a specific string. In this example, we can load every line of Shakespeare’s comedies with “shakespeare-comedies-*”. This also requires that our row key(s) be laid out by “AUTHOR-WORK-LINENUMBER”.

How-to: Use the Apache Oozie REST API

Apache Oozie has a Java client and a Java API for submitting and monitoring jobs, but what if you want to use Oozie from another language or a non-Java system? Oozie provides a Web Services API, which is an HTTP REST API. That is, you can do anything with Oozie simply by making requests to the Oozie server over HTTP. In fact, this is how the Oozie client and Oozie Java API themselves talk to the Oozie server. 

In this how-to, I’ll explain how the REST API works.

What is REST?




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