HBase: How to remove corrupted hbase:meta rowkeys containing single commas

[#1]

Hi all,

I've run into an interesting issue where corrupted entries with rowkeys containing a single comma (,) were inserted into hbase:meta. These rows show up in scans, but get, delete, and deleteall operations don't work on them. Example of such a row:

ROW COLUMN+CELL
rowkey, column=info:regioninfo, timestamp=..., value=...

Attempts to remove them with the Java client and HBCK2 (fixMeta) didn't work.

Has anyone dealt with this before? Is there a safe way to remove or repair such dangling/corrupted rowkeys from hbase:meta?

In addition, I have opened this upstream issue reporting the problem: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HBASE-29554

Thanks in advance for any guidance.

[#2]

@EmilKle Welcome to the Cloudera Community!

To help you get the best possible solution, I have tagged our HBase experts @smdas @blizano @pajoshi  who may be able to assist you further.

Please keep us updated on your post, and we hope you find a satisfactory solution to your query.

[#3]

@DianaTorres thank you for your prompt reply.
I haven't found a solution to this problem as of now. If you have any suggestions on how to solve this issue and get rid of the corrupted meta entries in the existing cluster, I would highly appreciate it.

Thank you in advance.

[#4]

Hi @shubham_sharma @ale241290xdf @aquilodran @David666 Do you have any insights here? Thanks!

[#5]

Just to add even more input on this, I can see a side effect of it shown in the HBCK report under Inconsistent Regions 

Just to add more input on this, in the HBase master logs I can also see:

<2025-09-16T10:11:27.734+0200> <WARN> <janitor.ReportMakingVisitor>: <INCONSISTENCY: Row name is not equal to serialized info:regioninfo content; row=XXX:XXX,e14ef354e1644a6a2b229ffde05f38d3 XXX:XXX,test,12345.07a983faf71bc641bfbb4e8736d378ac.; See if RegionInfo is referenced in another hbase:meta row? Delete?>

In meta:

XXX:XXX,e14ef354e1644a6a2b229ffde05f38d3 column=info:regioninfo, timestamp=2025-08-26T12:12:21.389, value={ENCODED => 07a983faf71bc641bfbb4e8736d378ac, NAME => 'XXX:XXX,test,12345.07a983faf71bc641bfbb4e8736d378ac.', STARTKEY => 'test', ENDKEY => ''}