Migrating from MongoDB to HBase

Question

Hi I am very new to HBase database. I downloaded some twitter data and stored into MongoDB. Now I need to transform that data into HBase to speed-up Hadoop processing. But I am not able to create it's scheme. Here I have twitter data into JSON format-

{
"_id" : ObjectId("512b71e6e4b02a4322d1c0b0"),
"id" : NumberLong("306044618179506176"),
"source" : "<a href=\"http://www.facebook.com/twitter\" rel=\"nofollow\">Facebook</a>",
"user" : {
    "name" : "Dada Bhagwan",
    "location" : "India",
    "url" : "http://www.dadabhagwan.org",
    "id" : 191724440,
    "protected" : false,
    "timeZone" : null,
    "description" : "Founder of Akram Vignan - Practical Spiritual Science of Self Realization",
    "screenName" : "dadabhagwan",
    "geoEnabled" : false,
    "profileImageURL" : "http://a0.twimg.com/profile_images/1647956820/M_DSC_0034_normal.jpg",
    "biggerProfileImageURL" : "http://a0.twimg.com/profile_images/1647956820/M_DSC_0034_bigger.jpg",
    "profileImageUrlHttps" : "https://si0.twimg.com/profile_images/1647956820/M_DSC_0034_normal.jpg",
    "profileImageURLHttps" : "https://si0.twimg.com/profile_images/1647956820/M_DSC_0034_normal.jpg",
    "biggerProfileImageURLHttps" : "https://si0.twimg.com/profile_images/1647956820/M_DSC_0034_bigger.jpg",
    "miniProfileImageURLHttps" : "https://si0.twimg.com/profile_images/1647956820/M_DSC_0034_mini.jpg",
    "originalProfileImageURLHttps" : "https://si0.twimg.com/profile_images/1647956820/M_DSC_0034.jpg",
    "followersCount" : 499,
    "profileBackgroundColor" : "EEE4C1",
    "profileTextColor" : "333333",
    "profileLinkColor" : "990000",
    "lang" : "en",
    "profileSidebarFillColor" : "FCF9EC",
    "profileSidebarBorderColor" : "CBC09A",
    "profileUseBackgroundImage" : true,
    "showAllInlineMedia" : false,
    "friendsCount" : 1,
    "favouritesCount" : 0,
    "profileBackgroundImageUrl" : "http://a0.twimg.com/profile_background_images/396759326/dadabhagwan-twitter.jpg",
    "profileBackgroundImageURL" : "http://a0.twimg.com/profile_background_images/396759326/dadabhagwan-twitter.jpg",
    "profileBackgroundImageUrlHttps" : "https://si0.twimg.com/profile_background_images/396759326/dadabhagwan-twitter.jpg",
    "profileBannerURL" : null,
    "profileBannerRetinaURL" : null,
    "profileBannerIPadURL" : null,
    "profileBannerIPadRetinaURL" : null,
    "miniProfileImageURL" : "http://a0.twimg.com/profile_images/1647956820/M_DSC_0034_mini.jpg",
    "originalProfileImageURL" : "http://a0.twimg.com/profile_images/1647956820/M_DSC_0034.jpg",
    "utcOffset" : -1,
    "contributorsEnabled" : false,
    "status" : null,
    "createdAt" : NumberLong("1284700143000"),
    "profileBannerMobileURL" : null,
    "profileBannerMobileRetinaURL" : null,
    "profileBackgroundTiled" : false,
    "statusesCount" : 1713,
    "verified" : false,
    "translator" : false,
    "listedCount" : 6,
    "followRequestSent" : false,
    "descriptionURLEntities" : [ ],
    "urlentity" : {
        "url" : "http://www.dadabhagwan.org",
        "start" : 0,
        "end" : 26,
        "expandedURL" : "http://www.dadabhagwan.org",
        "displayURL" : "http://www.dadabhagwan.org"
    },
    "rateLimitStatus" : null,
    "accessLevel" : 0
},
"contributors" : [ ],
"geoLocation" : null,
"place" : null,
"favorited" : false,
"retweet" : false,
"retweetedStatus" : null,
"retweetCount" : 0,
"userMentionEntities" : [ ],
"retweetedByMe" : false,
"currentUserRetweetId" : -1,
"possiblySensitive" : false,
"urlentities" : [
    {
        "url" : "http://t.co/gR1GohGjaj",
        "start" : 113,
        "end" : 135,
        "expandedURL" : "http://fb.me/2j2HKHJrM",
        "displayURL" : "fb.me/2j2HKHJrM"
    }
],
"hashtagEntities" : [ ],
"mediaEntities" : [ ],
"truncated" : false,
"inReplyToStatusId" : -1,
"text" : "Spiritual Quote of the Day :\n\n‘I am Chandubhai’ is an illusion itself and from that are \nkarmas charged. When... http://t.co/gR1GohGjaj",
"inReplyToUserId" : -1,
"inReplyToScreenName" : null,
"createdAt" : NumberLong("1361801697000"),
"rateLimitStatus" : null,
"accessLevel" : 0
}

Here how to divide data into columns and column-family? I thought to make one "twitter" column-family that contain source, getlocation, place, retweet etc... and another "user" column-family and that contain name, location etc... (user's data). i.e new column family for each inner level sub-document.

Is this approach is correct? Now How I will differentiate urlentity for "user" column-family and "twitter" column-family?

And how to handle those keys that contain list of sub-documents (for e.g. urlentity)

Answer 1

There are many ways to model this in HBase ranging from storing everything in a single column to having a different table for each sub entity with several other tables for "indexing".

Generally speaking you model the data in hbase based on you read and write access patterns. fo r example column family are stored in different files on disk. A reason to divide data into two column families is if there are a lot of cases where you need data from one and not the other. etc.

There's a good presentation about HBAse schema design by Ian Varley from HBaseCon 2012 you can find the slides here and the video here