Hive Hbase integration/ Hive HbaseHandler : Common issues and resolution

It is common that when we try out hive hbase integration it leads to lots of unexpected errors even though hive and hbase are running individually without any issues. Some common issues are

1) jars not available

The following jars should be available on hive auxpath

1. usr/lib/hive/lib/hive-hbase-handler-0.7.1-cdh3u2.jar
2. /usr/lib/hive/lib/hbase-0.90.4-cdh3u2.jar
3. /usr/lib/hive/lib/zookeeper-3.3.1.jar  

These jars vary with the hbase , hive and zookeeper version running on your cluster

2)zookeeper quorum not available for hive client
Should specify the zoo keeper server host names so that the leader hbase master server can be chosen for the hbase connection

hbase.zookeeper.quorum=zk1,zk2,zk3

Where zk1,zk2,zk3 should be the actual hostnames of the ZooKeeper servers

These values can be set either on your hive session or permanently on your hive configuration files

1) Setting in hive client session
$ hive -auxpath /usr/lib/hive/lib/hive-hbase-handler-0.7.1-cdh3u2.jar:/usr/lib/hive/lib/hbase-0.90.4-cdh3u2.jar:/usr/lib/hive/lib/zookeeper-3.3.1.jar -hiveconf hbase.zookeeper.quorum=zk1,zk2,zk3

2) Setting in hive-site.xml
<property>
<name>hive.aux.jars.path</name>
<value>file:///usr/lib/hive/lib/hive-hbase-handler-0.7.1-cdh3u2.jar,file:///usr/lib/hive/lib/hbase-0.90.4-cdh3u2.jar,file:///usr/lib/hive/lib/zookeeper-3.3.1.jar,file:///usr/lib/hive/lib/hive-contrib-0.7.1-cdh3u2.jar</value>
</property>

 <property>
<name>hbase.zookeeper.quorum</name>
<value>zk1,zk2,zk3</value>
</property>

Still hive hbase integration not working 
 
Error thrown : Master not running

Check whether the HbaseMaster is really down. If it is fine there could be other possibilities , a few common ones being
 

• Firstly you need to check whether hbase.zookeeper.quorum is correctly set, it shouldn’t be localhost.

• If multiple hbase clusters share the same zookeeper quorum then the znode parent value will be different for each. If that is the case, then set ‘zookeeper.znode.parent’ also has to be set in hive configuration, to the correct value from hbase-site.xml.