[HBASE-5548] Add ability to get a table in the shell

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Closed
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Fixed
• Fix Version/s: 0.95.0
• Component/s: shell
• Hadoop Flags: Reviewed

Release Note

Adding the ability to get a reference to a table in the shell.

Previously, all commands that acted on a table would need to take the name of the table as a string, which is annoying in an OO REPL. This patch introduces the ability to get and hold a reference to a table both on creation (via create(...)) and at will (via get_table(...)).

Further, to actually make the table useful, modifications to table specific class were made so you can have a reference and just do things like put, scan, get, etc. on that table reference. To accommodate new table functionality, table specific methods are easily added (one line) in a dynamic fashion via class methods in the Table. See examples in get, put, scan, etc..

There is also a lot of admin functionality tied to a table - things like disabling, dropping, describing, etc - that were added to the table class. Now you can do things like 'table.disable' and 'table.describe'. Again these were dynamically added, so new admin functionality for a table is as simple as adding the method name to one line in the Table class.

• Assignee: Jesse Yates
• Reporter: Jesse Yates
• Created: 09/Mar/12 08:01
• Updated: 23/Sep/13 18:30
• Resolved: 11/May/12 21:54

Description

Currently, all the commands that operate on a table in the shell first have to take the table as name as input.

There are two main considerations:

• It is annoying to have to write the table name every time, when you should just be able to get a reference to a table
• the current implementation is very wasteful - it creates a new HTable for each call (but reuses the connection since it uses the same configuration)

We should be able to get a handle to a single HTable and then operate on that.

Issue Links

• is depended upon by: HBASE-4879 Add Constraint support to shell