title: Using pig with HBase to get timestamp of records
body: <p>I have been tasked with getting the timestamp for the data in an HBase table. If I do a <code>scan</code> on the table in the hbase shell, I can see the timestamp for a given row, e.g., </p>
  
  <pre><code>scan 'mytable', {LIMIT =&gt; 1}
  ROW                          COLUMN+CELL                                                                       
   00001000715ce3d569ee256153d column=0:, timestamp=1326362691000, value=1320073315600x600                       
   f31db629b                                                                                                     
  1 row(s) in 1.9800 seconds
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>If I try to LOAD some data from this table in the grunt shell then I don't see the timestamp, only the value.</p>
  
  <pre><code>tableinput = LOAD 'hbase://imagestore-new' 
  USING org.apache.pig.backend.hadoop.hbase.HBaseStorage('0: ', '-loadKey true')
  AS (id:bytearray, thingy:chararray);
  illustrate tableinput;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>This gives me:</p>
  
  <pre><code>--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  | tableinput     | id:bytearray                         | thingy:chararray     | 
  --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  |                | 0000bizrad8156b98bffa60d8968fba0f326 | {=1348461029160x130} | 
  --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I'm hampered by a serious lack of info about how to use HBaseStorage with pig; the only thing I can find is the API entry (<a href="http://pig.apache.org/docs/r0.9.1/api/org/apache/pig/backend/hadoop/hbase/HBaseStorage.html" rel="nofollow">http://pig.apache.org/docs/r0.9.1/api/org/apache/pig/backend/hadoop/hbase/HBaseStorage.html</a>). I suspect there is a way to add it as a config in the call to HBaseStorage, similar perhaps to <code>'-loadKey true'</code>, but I don't know where to find this info. Please help!</p>