Store and retrieve string arrays in HBase - serialization

Question

I've read this answer (How to store complex objects into hadoop Hbase?) regarding the storing of string arrays with HBase.
There it is said to use the ArrayWritable Class to serialize the array. With WritableUtils.toByteArray(Writable ... writable) I'll get a byte[] which I can store in HBase.
When I now try to retrieve the rows again, I get a byte[] which I have somehow to transform back again into an ArrayWritable.
But I don't find a way to do this. Maybe you know an answer or am I doing fundamentally wrong serializing my String[]?

Answer 1

You may apply the following method to get back the ArrayWritable (taken from my earlier answer, see here) .
public static <T extends Writable> T asWritable(byte[] bytes, Class<T> clazz)
throws IOException {
T result = null;
DataInputStream dataIn = null;
try {
result = clazz.newInstance();
ByteArrayInputStream in = new ByteArrayInputStream(bytes);
dataIn = new DataInputStream(in);
result.readFields(dataIn);
}
catch (InstantiationException e) {
// should not happen
assert false;
}
catch (IllegalAccessException e) {
// should not happen
assert false;
}
finally {
IOUtils.closeQuietly(dataIn);
}
return result;
}
This method just deserializes the byte array to the correct object type, based on the provided class type token.
E.g:
Let's assume you have a custom ArrayWritable:
public class TextArrayWritable extends ArrayWritable {
public TextArrayWritable() {
super(Text.class);
}
}
Now you issue a single HBase get:
...
Get get = new Get(row);
Result result = htable.get(get);
byte[] value = result.getValue(family, qualifier);
TextArrayWritable tawReturned = asWritable(value, TextArrayWritable.class);
Text[] texts = (Text[]) tawReturned.toArray();
for (Text t : texts) {
System.out.print(t + " ");
}
...
Note:
You may have already found the readCompressedStringArray() and writeCompressedStringArray() methods in WritableUtils
which seem to be suitable if you have your own String array-backed Writable class.
Before using them, I'd warn you that these can cause serious performance hit due to
the overhead caused by the gzip compression/decompression.