Retrieving Composite Key (HBase)

Retrieving Composite Key (HBase)

Its common to want to have the key of your HBase table to be made up more than one component, especially to ensure that your key stays unique.  There is a lack of documentation on how this can be done, but it is pretty easy. HBase orders its keys and allows you to filter by the key prior to loading that data in from region servers and therefore a composite key is a powerful tool.

Creating the Key

Creating your composite key is easy.  You can use longs, strings, integers, whatever as long as Apache supports it so check the supported methods. 

long1 = 11111111;
long2 = 22222222;
Bytes.add(Bytes.toLong(long1), Bytes.toLong(long2));

Retrieving the Key

You will need to understand how many bytes long your data is.  A long is 8 bytes in size so the key can be retrieved by first retrieving the first lot of 8 bytes, then retrieving the second lot of 8 bytes.

//res is a Result object
byte[] rowkey = res.getRow();
long key1 = Bytes.toLong(rowkey, 0, 8);
long key2 = Bytes.toLong(rowkey, 8, 8);