Introduction

The latest release of Hypertable comes with a few binary packages, which can cut down significant amount of build time (including dependencies) if your platform is included (Linux (Intel/AMD x86 32 and 64-bit) and Mac OS X (Intel only) in the list.

Getting Started

System packages (*.rpm, *.deb and *.dmg) can be installed by users with root access. For users without root access, the compressed archive *.tar.bz2 can be unpacked in any directory the user has write permission.

RPM installation

rpm -i <package>.rpm

Debian installation

dpkg --install <package>.deb

Bzipped archive installation

tar jxvf <package>.tar.bz2

The binary packages create the /opt/hypertable and /var/opt/hypertable directories. After installation, make a symlink from /opt/hypertable/current to your current version.

cd /opt/hypertable
sudo ln -s 0.9.2.7/ current

NOTE: This document assumes that Hypertable has been installed under /opt/hypertable/$RELEASE with the symlink /opt/hypertable/current pointing to it.

Start the hypertable servers (in local/single node mode)

/opt/hypertable/current/bin/ht start all-servers local
DFS broker: available file descriptors: 1024
Started DFS Broker (local)
Started Hyperspace
Started Hypertable.Master
Started Hypertable.RangeServer
Started ThriftBroker

Use the Hypertable shell for experiments. For an introduction to the commands available, see HQLTutorial.

/opt/hypertable/current/bin/ht shell

Welcome to the hypertable command interpreter.
For information about Hypertable, visit http://www.hypertable.org/

Type 'help' for a list of commands, or 'help shell' for a
list of shell meta commands.

hypertable> 

Use Jruby to experiment with the Hypertable API (via ThriftBroker)

$ CLASSPATH=/opt/hypertable/current/lib/java/hypertable-0.9.2.7.jar:/opt/hypertable/current/lib/java/log4j-1.2.13.jar:/opt/hypertable/current/lib/java/libthrift.jar jirb
irb(main):001:0> require 'java'
=> false
irb(main):002:0> include_class 'org.hypertable.thrift.ThriftClient'
=> ["org.hypertable.thrift.ThriftClient"]
irb(main):003:0> client = ThriftClient.create("localhost", 38080)
=> #<Java::OrgHypertableThrift::ThriftClient:0x180b22e @java_object=#<Java::JavaObject:0x89dd>>
irb(main):004:0> client.hql_query("show tables").results.each {|t| puts t }
METADATA
=> nil
irb(main):005:0> 

The C++ and JVM languages clients are usable without installing additional software, as the Thrift libraries for C++ and Java are bundled with the package. For other Thrift supported languages, you'll need to install the Thrift package. Sample clients in Java, Perl, PHP, Python and Ruby are included in the package under the /opt/hypertable/current/lib directory.

Finally, to shut everything down, use the stop-servers.sh script:

/opt/hypertable/current/bin/stop-servers.sh