Custom HBaseKeyFactory and ColumnMapping

[Andrew Mains]

Hi all,

I'm currently experimenting with using the new HBaseKeyFactory interface 
(implemented in https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HIVE-6411) to do 
some custom serialization and predicate pushdown on our HBase schema. 
Ideally, I'd like to be able to use the information from the 
hbase.columns.mapping property on the table, and indeed, 
AbstractHBaseKeyFactory seems to support this use case, exposing a 
protected ColumnMappings.ColumnMapping keyMapping member. However, 
ColumnMappings.ColumnMapping exposes no public members (everything is 
package private org.apache.hadoop.hive.hbase), meaning that I can't read 
any data from the ColumnMapping in my custom HBaseKeyFactory.

Is this behavior intentional? Obviously I could work around this by 
declaring my factory in the same package, but it seems like the user 
experience would be better if there were public accessors for the fields 
in ColumnMappings.ColumnMapping. Is there another way to do this that 
I'm missing? If this isn't intentional, I'll raise a JIRA issue and 
submit a (small) patch.

Thanks!

Andrew