Details
Major Description
I was trying to bulk load using the new HFileOutputFormat. When using a MapReduce in which map generates {{KeyValue}}s and reduce is equal to KeyValueSortReducer, and using the constructor using (byte[] row, byte[] family, byte[] qualifier, byte[] value), the (undefined) timestamp was inserted as HConstants.LATEST_TIMESTAMP/Long.MAX_VALUE into HBase. This causes all kinds of troubles, but most importantly, while the records were in the table, other MapReduces (using TableInputFormat) and Hbase shell's 'get'-command did not fetch them. Guess there is some sort of filtering of future dates.
As I understood from St.Ack, the LASTEST_TIMESTAMP is supposed to be replaced by System.currentTimeMillis(), but I don't see this reflected in the code of KeyValue, and apparently it did not happen elsewhere; perhaps because there is no actual HBase connection?