Exporting an HBase table to dump files on HDFS

The HBase export utility dumps the contents of a table to the same HDFS cluster. The dump file is in a Hadoop sequence file format. Exporting data to Hadoop sequence files has merits for data backup, because the Hadoop sequence file format supports several compression types and algorithms. With it we can choose the best compression options to fit our environment.

Like the copytable utility we mentioned in the previous recipe, export is configurable with a start and an end timestamp, so that only the data within a specific time frame will be dumped. This feature enables export to incrementally export an HBase table to HDFS.

HBase export is also a live backup option. As the cluster is running, there ...

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