Creating your first report with Crux

In this post, we will walk through the steps in creating a simple tabular report with a table stockData in HBase. This table has the date as the rowkey and has column families price, spread and stats. We store everything in as strings, not exactly the right way to store the numerics but perfect for an introductory demo. We have another blog post coming up explaining the different data types and how we can work with them.

Once Crux is installed, open your browser and point to http://hostname:8080/crux. The Crux GUI will open up. We will first define our connection to HBase using the Connection page.

We define a unique name of the connection, and give the zookeeper host:port location. If this connection is valid, clicking on Save leads us to

We next define a mapping, a mapping which tells about the rows, column families and qualifiers in our HBase table, and their respective types. We configure Row Aliases for the rowkey, and Column Aliases for the column family and qualifier.

Select a connection and table name for the mapping.

Let us now add a row alias. In our case, we define a simple row alias of type String. There is no fixed length, so we leave it blank.

Let us now define our column families and qualifiers.

For column family price and qualifiers open, high and close, we define the aliases

Our mapping is now saved for use in a report

We now design a report by giving it a name, choosing the mapping and selecting the row and columns. The Dimensions and Measures are prefilled based on their types. We can drag and drop to the columns area for a tabular report or to X or Y axis for a chart. In our case, we have selected to view the report as a grid, so we only drag and drop to the Columns area.

Now we can view the results in a tabular format.

In our subsequent posts, we will discuss creating advanced reports with filters and different datatypes. We will learn to use range scans and create different kinds of charts. Keep tuned!