Major Description
There's a bit of code in hbase-daemon.sh that makes HBase master being SIGKILLed when stopping it rather than trying SIGTERM (like it does for other daemons). When HBase is executed in a standalone mode (and the only daemon you need to run is master) that causes newly created tables to go missing as unflushed data is thrown out. If there was not a good reason to kill master with SIGKILL perhaps we can take that special case out and rely on SIGTERM.