Yes, I thought about this too. A few things here. We are trying to get a value from the put, not from the hbase result. The column is not missing here, it's the value that is "wrong", since it was not converted to a long.. Also, this is very unlikely since we store these numbers like map slot millis etc as long in the put so very unlikely that this will break. Also, my thinking was, do we want to break the processing of this file simply because the post processing value was incorrect and mark the whole batch as not completely processed? I was considering adding another value in the states for "PREPROCESSED, LOADED, PROCESSED" as "POST PROCESSED" and was going to speak to Joep today about that. But none the less, let me see which exception I can throw.