Apache HBase is the Hadoop database, which is a distribute, sacalable, big data store. The following is some steps of configuring and using HBase as a new user guide.
1) Firstly, download latest version of HBase from official site: http://hbase.apache.org/. A binary version is preferred.
2) Unpack the compressed tar file, and start to config it. The most important things of configuring hbase includes:
i) Change conf/hbase-site.xml to look like this:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="configuration.xsl"?>
<configuration>
<property>
<name>hbase.rootdir</name>
<value>file:///DIRECTORY/hbase</value>
</property>
<property>
<name>hbase.zookeeper.property.dataDir</name>
<value>/DIRECTORY/zookeeper</value>
</property>
</configuration>
while, DIRECTORY is your local directory, which you want to store the data, a sample name could be like this: /home/yourname/database/hbase. And also, you can set up the directory for zookeeper, but that's not mandatory.
ii) For ubuntu users, or even linux users, also you should change your hosts a little bit. As the tutorial in the official site says: "HBase expects the loopback IP address to be 127.0.0.1. Ubuntu and some other distributions, for example, will default to 127.0.1.1 and this will cause problems for you". A modified hosts file possibly may look like this:
"yourname" means your user name in ubuntu. If you do not modify the hosts file in /etc, then possibly, you may encounter a problem when you start to use hbase shell: HBase will give you a error message says "ERROR: org.apache.hadoop.hbase.PleaseHoldException: org.apache.hadoop.hbase.PleaseHoldException: Master is initializing". The loopback IP address was set up correctly, which may cause the master to stuck in the initialization process.127.0.0.1 localhost
127.0.0.1 yourname
127.0.1.1 yourname# The following lines are desirable for IPv6 capable hosts::1 ip6-localhost ip6-loopback
fe00::0 ip6-localnet
3) Then you can simply launch HBase by using: ./bin/start-hbase.sh. The master will be running, you can check it by looking at running process in your ubuntu. You can also terminate HBase by using: ./bin/stop-hbase.sh
4) Moreover, you can also use HBase shell to create new tables or operate on existed tables by using: ./bin/hbase shell. But firstly, you should launch HBase master by using the command in step 3), otherwise, HBase shell is not gonna work.
