HBase 0.96.0 was released recently on October 18th, 2013. Some notable changes are 1) Adopted protocol buffer as the wire format 2) Reduced mean time to recovery 3) Removed ROOT table Let’s take a look at all these new changes in depth to understand the new design and explore the differences/changes introduced in the codebase. In this first blog, we will take a look at protocol buffer adoption in HBase and examine the differences it introduced in the code base The main impact of the change is all the classes which previously implemented Writable interface to be marshaled over the RPC wire do not need to implement the interface anymore. In another word, both manual marshaling/demarshaling write(final DataOutput out) and readFields(final DataInput in) are not required anymore. Instead, it relies on protobufs to send the Get request over the RPC wire. Take a look at the following https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HBASE-5305 Get class after 0.96.0, does not need to implement Writable interface

public class Get extends OperationWithAttributes
  implements Row, Comparable

Old Get class definition implements Writable interface with readFields(final DataInput in) and write(final DataOutput out) implemented

public class Get extends OperationWithAttributes
  implements Writable, Row, Comparable {

 public void readFields(final DataInput in)
  throws IOException {
    int version = in.readByte();
    if (version > GET_VERSION) {
      throw new IOException("unsupported version");
    }
    this.row = Bytes.readByteArray(in);
    this.lockId = in.readLong();
    this.maxVersions = in.readInt();
    boolean hasFilter = in.readBoolean();
    if (hasFilter) {
      this.filter = Classes.createWritableForName(
        Bytes.toString(Bytes.readByteArray(in)));
      this.filter.readFields(in);
    }
    this.cacheBlocks = in.readBoolean();
    this.tr = new TimeRange();
    tr.readFields(in);
    int numFamilies = in.readInt();
    this.familyMap =
      new TreeMap<byte [],NavigableSet>(Bytes.BYTES_COMPARATOR);
    for(int i=0; i<numFamilies; i++) {
      byte [] family = Bytes.readByteArray(in);
      boolean hasColumns = in.readBoolean();
      NavigableSet set = null;
      if(hasColumns) {
        int numColumns = in.readInt();
        set = new TreeSet(Bytes.BYTES_COMPARATOR);
        for(int j=0; j<numColumns; j++) {
          byte [] qualifier = Bytes.readByteArray(in);
          set.add(qualifier);
        }
      }
      this.familyMap.put(family, set);
    }
    readAttributes(in);
  }

  public void write(final DataOutput out)
  throws IOException {
    out.writeByte(GET_VERSION);
    Bytes.writeByteArray(out, this.row);
    out.writeLong(this.lockId);
    out.writeInt(this.maxVersions);
    if(this.filter == null) {
      out.writeBoolean(false);
    } else {
      out.writeBoolean(true);
      Bytes.writeByteArray(out, Bytes.toBytes(filter.getClass().getName()));
      filter.write(out);
    }
    out.writeBoolean(this.cacheBlocks);
    tr.write(out);
    out.writeInt(familyMap.size());
    for(Map.Entry<byte [], NavigableSet> entry :
      familyMap.entrySet()) {
      Bytes.writeByteArray(out, entry.getKey());
      NavigableSet columnSet = entry.getValue();
      if(columnSet == null) {
        out.writeBoolean(false);
      } else {
        out.writeBoolean(true);
        out.writeInt(columnSet.size());
        for(byte [] qualifier : columnSet) {
          Bytes.writeByteArray(out, qualifier);
        }
      }
    }
    writeAttributes(out);
  }
}

New Put class definition after 0.96.0

public class Put extends Mutation implements HeapSize, Comparable

Old Put class definition

public class Put extends Mutation
  implements HeapSize, Writable, Comparable {

 public void readFields(final DataInput in)
  throws IOException {
    int version = in.readByte();
    if (version > PUT_VERSION) {
      throw new IOException("version not supported");
    }
    this.row = Bytes.readByteArray(in);
    this.ts = in.readLong();
    this.lockId = in.readLong();
    this.writeToWAL = in.readBoolean();
    int numFamilies = in.readInt();
    if (!this.familyMap.isEmpty()) this.familyMap.clear();
    for(int i=0;i<numFamilies;i++) {
      byte [] family = Bytes.readByteArray(in);
      int numKeys = in.readInt();
      List keys = new ArrayList(numKeys);
      int totalLen = in.readInt();
      byte [] buf = new byte[totalLen];
      int offset = 0;
      for (int j = 0; j  1) {
      readAttributes(in);
    }
  }

  public void write(final DataOutput out)
  throws IOException {
    out.writeByte(PUT_VERSION);
    Bytes.writeByteArray(out, this.row);
    out.writeLong(this.ts);
    out.writeLong(this.lockId);
    out.writeBoolean(this.writeToWAL);
    out.writeInt(familyMap.size());
    for (Map.Entry<byte [], List> entry : familyMap.entrySet()) {
      Bytes.writeByteArray(out, entry.getKey());
      List keys = entry.getValue();
      out.writeInt(keys.size());
      int totalLen = 0;
      for(KeyValue kv : keys) {
        totalLen += kv.getLength();
      }
      out.writeInt(totalLen);
      for(KeyValue kv : keys) {
        out.writeInt(kv.getLength());
        out.write(kv.getBuffer(), kv.getOffset(), kv.getLength());
      }
    }
    writeAttributes(out);
  }

New Scan class definition after 0.96.0

public class Scan extends OperationWithAttributes 

Old Scan class definition

public class Scan extends OperationWithAttributes implements Writable {

You can find protobuf definition files in the src/main/protobuf folder of the hbase-protocol project In HTable, we can see how the protobuf is being used in action in the get(final Get get) method, RegionServerCallable is built which uses ProtobufUtil to make the actual protobuf GetRequest to the server HTable

@Override
  public Result get(final Get get) throws IOException {
    RegionServerCallable callable = new RegionServerCallable(this.connection,
        getName(), get.getRow()) {
      public Result call() throws IOException {
        return ProtobufUtil.get(getStub(), getLocation().getRegionInfo().getRegionName(), get);
      }
    };
    return rpcCallerFactory. newCaller().callWithRetries(callable, this.operationTimeout);
  }

ProtobufUtil is in package org.apache.hadoop.hbase.protobuf is the protobuf util class to help build protobuf calls using the auto generated protobufs classes.

package org.apache.hadoop.hbase.protobuf;

 /**
   * A helper to invoke a Get using client protocol.
   *
   * @param client
   * @param regionName
   * @param get
   * @return the result of the Get
   * @throws IOException
   */
  public static Result get(final ClientService.BlockingInterface client,
      final byte[] regionName, final Get get) throws IOException {
    GetRequest request =
      RequestConverter.buildGetRequest(regionName, get);
    try {
      GetResponse response = client.get(null, request);
      if (response == null) return null;
      return toResult(response.getResult());
    } catch (ServiceException se) {
      throw getRemoteException(se);
    }
  }

RequestConverter

 /**
   * Create a protocol buffer GetRequest for a client Get
   *
   * @param regionName the name of the region to get
   * @param get the client Get
   * @return a protocol buffer GetRequest
   */
  public static GetRequest buildGetRequest(final byte[] regionName,
      final Get get) throws IOException {
    GetRequest.Builder builder = GetRequest.newBuilder();
    RegionSpecifier region = buildRegionSpecifier(
      RegionSpecifierType.REGION_NAME, regionName);
    builder.setRegion(region);
    builder.setGet(ProtobufUtil.toGet(get));
    return builder.build();
  }