Interacting with HBase – the HBase Client API

Now that we have an understanding of how to execute basic HBase operations via the shell, let's try and attempt them through the Java API:

Configuration conf = HBaseConfiguration.create();
Connection conn = ConnectionFactory.createConnection(conf); 

The recommended way in which the configuration should be provided to an HBase client application is to copy over the hbase-site.xml from the cluster and make it available on the classpath of the client application (typically included in src/main/resources).

The HBaseConfiguration class reads the hbase-site.xml and populates properties such as the Zookeeper quorum hosts and ports, within a Configuration object.

The ConnectionFactory class handles the lifecycle management of Connections to an HBase cluster. The Connection class encapsulates TCP connections to the RegionServers, as well as a local cache of the META region, which contains the region assignments.

Connections are heavyweight objects. Thankfully...