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Date: Thu, 7 Mar 2013 14:16:02 -0800
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Subject: Notes from HBase Types/Serialization Discussion
From: Stack <stack@duboce.net>
To: HBase Dev List <dev@hbase.apache.org>
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(I'm sending this for Doug Meil; he is having difficulty getting this up on
the dev list)


Hi Devs-

Notes from an HBase client conference call a few of us had yesterday.
 Attendees:  Enis, Nick D., James Taylor, Stack, LarsH, Doug Meil and Andy
Johnson.

   - Discussion of Serialization Scheme Independent of Java
      - After a short discussion, this is a very interesting idea but off
      the table for the next 4-6 releases.
      - E.g., would we have to invent serialization for C++ or Python
      clients?  It's not a small undertaking.
      - Nobody was aware of any other open source libraries that did this.
   - Component Priority
      - After a healthy discussion, the following priority emerged:
   - 1) Serialized Types
         - But focusing on Java.  Using some combination of Orderly and
         Phoenix
         - Nick/James to lead this.
         - New Jira will be created for this effort, with sub-tasks for
         follow-on tasks.
      - 2) Utilities
         - E.g., something akin to what HBASE-7221 was trying to achieve.
          This might also be a documentation exercise on how to
properly use Orderly
         - I.e., utilities to build rowkeys (et al.) in code for use by
         applications (I.e., not Hbase itself)
         - Consensus on support for both FixedLength and VariableLength
         rowkeys, to allow for faster scans especially in the former case.  But
         still providing utilities for variable length keys because
folks still use
         things like URLs in rowkeys.
      - 3) Schema
         - Schema definitions of rowkeys and tables that could be
         externalized to Hive, et al.
      - HBase-Centric API
      - With respect to Utilities and Schemas, there was consensus that
      completely enveloping HTable is not the suggested path, but rather we
      should look for opportunities to improve the Get, Put, Scan
interfaces with
      Htable but make it less tedious with byte-array handling.
   - HBASE-7221
      - This will be closed as "won't fixed", but will be linked from
      whatever the new Jira is as a related ticket.
   - Agreeing To Something And Actually Doing It
      - Stack proposed the novel idea of all of us agreeing to something
      and then actually doing it, and there was consensus that this was a good
      idea.   :-)

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