A script that deletes all tables in Hbase

Question

I can tell hbase to disable and delete particular tables using:

disable 'tablename'
drop 'tablename'

But I want to delete all the tables in the database without hardcoding the names of any of the tables. Is there a way to do this? I want to do this through the command-line utility ./hbase shell, not through Java or Thrift.

Answer 1

disable_all and drop_all have been added as commands in the HBase ruby shell. These commands were added in jira HBASE-3506 These commands take a regex of tables to disable/drop. And they will ask for confirmation before continuing. That should make droping lots of tables pretty easy and not require outside libraries or scripting.

Answer 2

I have a handy script that does exactly this, using the Python Happybase library:

import happybase

c = happybase.Connection()

for table in c.tables():
  c.disable_table(table)
  c.delete_table(table)
  print "Deleted: " + table

You will need Happybase installed to use this script, and you can install it as:

sudo easy_install happybase

Answer 3

You can pipe commands to the bin/hbase shell command. From there you can use some scripting to grab the table names and pipe the disable/delete commands back to hbase.

i.e.

echo "list" | bin/hbase shell | ./filter_table_names.pl > table_names.txt
./turn_table_names_into_disable_delete_commands.pl table_names.txt | bin/hbase shell