Working with WCF and HBase

Question

I am in a trouble with WCF and hbase. I have a program that is written using Python. The program use hbase database in the back end. Now i need a WCF service to write in .NET to connect to hbase and access data. Is there a good way to work with WCF and hbase together? If so please give me some helpful links or please suggest how can i call some python functions from WCF? Because i have some python libraries written which will do the job for reading and writing to hbase. So if i can call python method from WCF then there will be no problem at all. Any help is eagerly appreciated please.

Thanks, Sohel.

Answer 1

You can use HBase Thrift API if you want to use HBase with .NET applications. You might wanna have a look at HBase sharp, C# binding for HBase. This is plain thrift binding without region awareness.

Apart from Thrift, HBase provides Avro API which can also be called from .NET.

This is the example provided with the HBase sharp project :

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using HBase.Thrift;
using Thrift.Protocol;
using Thrift.Transport;

namespace HBase.Example
{
    class Program
    {
        private static Hbase.Client _hbase;
        static byte[] table_name = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes("vadim_test");
        static readonly byte[] ID = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes("Id");
        static readonly byte[] NAME = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes("Name");
        static int i = 0;

        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            int port = 9090;

            string host = args.Length == 1 ? args[0] : "localhost";

            var socket = new TSocket(host, port);
            var transport = new TBufferedTransport(socket);
            var proto = new TBinaryProtocol(transport);
            _hbase = new Hbase.Client(proto);

            try
            {
                transport.Open();

                var names = _hbase.getTableNames();
                names.ForEach(msg => Console.WriteLine(Encoding.UTF8.GetString(msg)));

                CreateTable();
                Insert();
                Get();

                transport.Close();
            } catch(Exception e)
            {
                Console.Error.Write(e.Message);
            }
        }

        private static void Get()
        {
            var scanner = _hbase.scannerOpen(table_name, Guid.Empty.ToByteArray(),
                                             new List<byte[]>(){ID});
            for (var entry = _hbase.scannerGet(scanner); entry.Count > 0; entry = _hbase.scannerGet(scanner))
            {
                foreach (var rowResult in entry)
                {
                    Console.Write("{0} => ", new Guid(rowResult.Row));
                    var res = rowResult.Columns.Select(c => BitConverter.ToInt32(c.Value.Value, 0));
                    foreach (var cell in res)
                    {
                        Console.WriteLine("{0}", cell);
                    }
                }
            }
        }

        private static void Insert()
        {
            _hbase.mutateRows(table_name, new List<BatchMutation>()
            {
                new BatchMutation()
                {
                    Row = Guid.NewGuid().ToByteArray(),
                    Mutations = new List<Mutation> {
                        new Mutation{Column = ID, IsDelete = false, Value = BitConverter.GetBytes(i++) }
                    }
                },
                new BatchMutation()
                {
                    Row = Guid.NewGuid().ToByteArray(),
                    Mutations = new List<Mutation> {
                        new Mutation{Column = ID, IsDelete = false, Value = BitConverter.GetBytes(i++) }
                    }
                }
            });
        }

        private static void CreateTable()
        {
            _hbase.disableTable(table_name);
            _hbase.deleteTable(table_name);

            _hbase.createTable(
                table_name,
                new List<ColumnDescriptor>()
                    {
                        new ColumnDescriptor {Name = ID, InMemory = true},
                        new ColumnDescriptor {Name = NAME, InMemory = true}
                    }
                );
        }
    }
}

HTH