Using HBase Shell to manage the cluster

There are a bunch of HBase Shell commands for managing the cluster. These commands belong to the tool's group.

Note

Warning

Many of these commands are for advanced users only, as their misuse can cause unexpected damages to an HBase installation.

The tool's group commands provide an interface to manage HBase regions manually. Their features include:

• Region deployment

• Region splitting

• Cluster balancing

• Region flushing and compaction

Although HBase does all these operations automatically, by default, there are situations wherein you may want to balance your region server's load manually. This is especially true when the default, balancing algorithm does not work well for your data access pattern.

In this recipe, we will describe how to manually flush, compact, split, balance, and move HBase regions.

Getting ready

Start your HBase cluster, create a table, and put some data into it. We will use the hly_temp table we created in Chapter 2, Data Migration, for...