Best practice of handling hbase connection and table in java?

Question

I'm using hbase-client 1.2.3, I saw there is a comment in Connection.getTable() method:

• Retrieve a Table implementation for accessing a table.

• The returned Table is not thread safe, a new instance should be created for each using thread.

• This is a lightweight operation, pooling or caching of the returned Table

• is neither required nor desired.

So I start wondering what's the best practice to handle connection and table?

For example, I have a main class, will start several threads, let's call A,B,C...

Now I call "Connection connection = ConnectionFactory.createConnection();" in the main method, and pass the connection to each thread as a param to each thread. And then init Table class in each thread.

I want to know is this the best way? Will it cause some threadsafe or efficiency or any other problems?

Answer 1

According to the documentation:

Connection creation is a heavy-weight operation. Connection implementations are thread-safe, so that the client can create a connection once, and share it with different threads. Table and Admin instances, on the other hand, are light-weight and are not thread-safe. Typically, a single connection per client application is instantiated and every thread will obtain its own Table instance. Caching or pooling of Table and Admin is not recommended.

So I would suggest that you initialize a connection only once and a new table every time it's required.

Sample Code:

//initialize connection
Configuration hBaseConfig = HBaseConfiguration.create();
Connection connection = ConnectionFactory.createConnection(hBaseConfig);

//initialize table
try (Table table = connection.getTable(TableName.valueOf("table-name"))) {
    //use table
}