@Sam Mingolelli namespaces have been available since 0.96 and not very well documented. Here's a scenario I was able to dig up to attempt answering your question. Step 1: Superuser (e.g. user hbase) creates namespace foo. create_namespace ‘foo’ Step 2: Admin gives dba-bar full permissions to the namespace: grant ’dba-bar', 'RWXCA', '@foo’ Note: namespaces are prefixed by @. Step 3: dba-bar creates tables within the namespace: create ’foo:t1', 'f1’ Step 4: dba-bar hands out permissions to the tables: grant ‘user-x’, ‘RWXCA’, ‘foo:t1’ Note: All users will be able to see namespaces and tables within namespaces, but not the data. The next best source of information would be the umbrela Jira for namespaces https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HBASE-8015. It has a design document in PDF form https://issues.apache.org/jira/secure/attachment/12580245/Namespace%20Design.pdf Outside of that, please feel free to read the namespace source code or unit tests https://github.com/apache/hbase/blob/master/hbase-server/src/test/java/org/apache/hadoop/hbase/TestNamespace.java. Bottom line, to use namespaces see above, to make your current application compliant with namespaces, change the code to point to the tables within namespaces, I already suggested to use Clone Snapshot and Export Snapshot tools or write Mapreduce to export/import into new table within a new namespace. I will escalate this to our docs team to have a better document as it's obvious people are starting to use this. I would've pointed you to our docs if we had that info, that's why I sent you stack overflow link as this question has not come up before. Finally, if at some point you will want to grant authorization to namespaces using Ranger, here's a thread for that https://community.hortonworks.com/questions/17764/ranger-hbase-namespace.html.
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