In evaluating strategies for minimizing downtime when a region server fails, in addition to the common approaches such as lowering the zookeeper timeout, is it possible to use replication to improve availability (at the cost of consistency) for reads?
I'm still getting more familiar with the HBASE api, but my thought would be to do something like: - attempt read from the primary cluster - if read fails because of downed region server, read from slave cluster (understanding that the read may be a little bit stale) I wouldn't expect this to happen too frequently, but in a case where I would rather return slightly stale data rather than no data, is this a viable approach? I'm not sure how the java api deals with reading from a region server that is in the process of failing over? Is there a way to detect that? Thanks for the help.
