What is the fastest way to bulk load data into HBase programmatically?

Question

I have a Plain text file with possibly millions of lines which needs custom parsing and I want to load it into an HBase table as fast as possible (using Hadoop or HBase Java

Answer 1

One interesting thing is that during insertion of 1,000,000 rows, 25 Mappers (tasks) are spawned but they run serially (one after another); is this normal?

mapreduce.tasktracker.map.tasks.maximum parameter which is defaulted to 2 determines the maximum number of tasks that can run in parallel on a node. Unless changed, you should see 2 map tasks running simultaneously on each node.

Answer 2

I've gone through a process that is probably very similar to yours of attempting to find an efficient way to load data from an MR into HBase. What I found to work is using HFileOutputFormat as the OutputFormatClass of the MR.

Below is the basis of my code that I have to generate the job and the Mapper map function which writes out the data. This was fast. We don't use it anymore, so I don't have numbers on hand, but it was around 2.5 million records in under a minute.

Here is the (stripped down) function I wrote to generate the job for my MapReduce process to put data into HBase

private Job createCubeJob(...) {
    //Build and Configure Job
    Job job = new Job(conf);
    job.setJobName(jobName);
    job.setMapOutputKeyClass(ImmutableBytesWritable.class);
    job.setMapOutputValueClass(Put.class);
    job.setMapperClass(HiveToHBaseMapper.class);//Custom Mapper
    job.setJarByClass(CubeBuilderDriver.class);
    job.setInputFormatClass(TextInputFormat.class);
    job.setOutputFormatClass(HFileOutputFormat.class);

    TextInputFormat.setInputPaths(job, hiveOutputDir);
    HFileOutputFormat.setOutputPath(job, cubeOutputPath);

    Configuration hConf = HBaseConfiguration.create(conf);
    hConf.set("hbase.zookeeper.quorum", hbaseZookeeperQuorum);
    hConf.set("hbase.zookeeper.property.clientPort", hbaseZookeeperClientPort);

    HTable hTable = new HTable(hConf, tableName);

    HFileOutputFormat.configureIncrementalLoad(job, hTable);
    return job;
}

This is my map function from the HiveToHBaseMapper class (slightly edited ).

public void map(WritableComparable key, Writable val, Context context)
        throws IOException, InterruptedException {
    try{
        Configuration config = context.getConfiguration();
        String[] strs = val.toString().split(Constants.HIVE_RECORD_COLUMN_SEPARATOR);
        String family = config.get(Constants.CUBEBUILDER_CONFIGURATION_FAMILY);
        String column = strs[COLUMN_INDEX];
        String Value = strs[VALUE_INDEX];
        String sKey = generateKey(strs, config);
        byte[] bKey = Bytes.toBytes(sKey);
        Put put = new Put(bKey);
        put.add(Bytes.toBytes(family), Bytes.toBytes(column), (value <= 0) 
                        ? Bytes.toBytes(Double.MIN_VALUE)
                        : Bytes.toBytes(value));

        ImmutableBytesWritable ibKey = new ImmutableBytesWritable(bKey);
        context.write(ibKey, put);

        context.getCounter(CubeBuilderContextCounters.CompletedMapExecutions).increment(1);
    }
    catch(Exception e){
        context.getCounter(CubeBuilderContextCounters.FailedMapExecutions).increment(1);    
    }

}

I pretty sure this isn't going to be a Copy&Paste solution for you. Obviously the data I was working with here didn't need any custom processing (that was done in a MR job before this one). The main thing I want to provide out of this is the HFileOutputFormat. The rest is just an example of how I used it. :)
I hope it gets you onto a solid path to a good solution. :