How describe Hbase column family?

If you use the describe command from the hbase shell you'll get the information for each column family. Currently, there is no way to filter on a single family.

Example:

hbase(main):003:0> describe 'TABLE_NAME'
 'TABLE_NAME',
 {NAME => 'FAMILY_NAME',
  DATA_BLOCK_ENCODING => 'NONE',
  BLOOMFILTER => 'ROW',
  REPLICATION_ true                                          
  SCOPE => '0',
  VERSIONS => '1',
  COMPRESSION => 'NONE',
  MIN_VERSIONS => '0', TTL => '2147483647',
  KEEP_DELETED_CELLS => 'false',
  BLOCKSIZE => '65536',
  IN_MEMORY => 'false',
  BLOCKCACHE => 'true'
 }   

There is no command to describe the Hbase column family (which can display the column qualifiers), but I used Hue Hbase Browser, it has a smartview, which can display column qualifiers of a column family.

(It can not show all the column qualifiers of column family( like describe), but it can show a record with all the column qualifiers, which is helpful for me to understand CF) (Something is better than nothing).

You can refer this link for more information: http://gethue.com/the-web-ui-for-hbase-hbase-browser/.

NOTE: Here is a sample page screenshot, showing column qualifiers of a Column Family ("p")

If this is not helpful, you can write a Happy Script to display all the column qualifiers of a given Column Family, or you can use this API.

getFamilyMap public NavigableMap getFamilyMap(byte[] family)

Map of qualifiers to values. Returns a Map of the form: Map

Parameters:

family - column family to get

Returns: map of qualifiers to values

UPDATE #1

Recently I wrote a Java program to display the column family and column qualifiers of a hbase table. Remember, this program will do a full table scan and analyze every cell, to get the qualifier names.Might take very longer for larger tables.

Here is the link for the program.