How can I use the HBASE Shell to create a table with pre splitting and compression or other options

Question

In the HBase shell, the help file shows us that there are several allowable syntaxes for creating a table:

 create \'tableName\', {NAME => \'colFamily\', VER         


        

Answer 1

What eventually became clear after experimentation was that the Shell syntax will accept a set of Column Family dictionaries, and the SPLIT dictionary is really its own animal (which makes sense as it modifies the whole table, not just a particular column family.

So an additional useful example to have would be:

 create 'tableName', {NAME => 'colFam', VERSIONS => 2, COMPRESSION => 'SNAPPY'}, 
    {SPLITS => ['333','666','FOO']}

Note that the splits dictionary is separate from the column family dictionary; presumably we could still enter a set of column families and then end with the Splits dictionary.