Everyone expects their HBase administrator to keep the cluster running smoothly, storing a huge amount of data in it, handling maybe millions of requests simultaneously, quickly, and reliably. Keeping a large amount of data in HBase accessible, manageable, and easy to query, is a critical task for an administrator.
Besides a solid knowledge of the cluster you are operating, just as important are the tools you use. HBase ships with several administration tools to make life easier. There is a web-based administration page; on this page you can view the status of the cluster and execute simple administration tasks such as region splitting. However, more powerful than HBase web UI is the HBase Shell tool. This command-line tool has features to create and manage HBase tables, to insert and view data in the tables, and also has methods to manage the cluster itself.
HBase also provides a bunch of Java utilities with its installation. You can import and use these utilities directly from...
