[GORA-195] [gora-hbase] Allow mapping of an array to a single column

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Open
• Priority: Trivial
• Resolution: Unresolved
• Affects Version/s: 0.2.1
• Fix Version/s: 1.0
• Component/s: gora-hbase
• Environment: HBase 0.90.4 backend, Hadoop 1.0.1
• Assignee: Unassigned
• Reporter: Alfonso Nishikawa Muñumer
• Created: 04/Jan/13 12:21
• Updated: 03/Mar/22 14:27

Description

At this time, defining a mapping in HBase for an array field to a family:column like this:

{"name": "A",
 "fields": [
        {"name": "field",  "type": {"type": "array", "values": "string"}}
   ]
}

<class name="A" ...>
  <field name="field" family="r" qualifier="c"/>
</class&gt;

in HBase is discouraging since gets to an unexpected behavior loading parts of the rest of the record.

So: by now only is allowed mappings of arrays(and maps) to families.

Workaround: enclose the array inside an inner optional record like this:

{"name": "A",
 "fields": [
        {"name":"holder", "type:" ["null", {
                    "name":"holderRecord",
                    "type":"record",
                    "fields": [
                         {"name": "field",  "type": {"type": "array", "values": "string"}}
                     ]
        }}
   ]
}

The necessity comes partially if you don't want to create a family for each array in you HBase database (advised not to do), or if you just want to map to a column when your array is read-only.