Architecting HBase Applications

Chapter 10. Use Case: HBase as a Master Data Management Tool

Next, we will take a look at the New York–based digital advertising company Collective. Collective is an advertising technology company that helps companies impact the bottom line by connecting brands and customers together. This approach is known as customer 360, and to execute efficiently, it requires numerous data sources and boatloads of data. Collective leverages Hadoop and HBase to help offer their clients a unified view of the consumer and allowing brands to seamlessly message across channels and devices, including PCs, tablets, and smartphones.

When looking at customer 360, Hadoop is the obvious choice. A solid customer 360 implementation gets better and better as data sources are added. Most data sources that customers interact with on a regular basis tend to create unstructured data. Some of the typical data sources seen in a customer 360 are clickstream through offerings like Adobe Omniture or IBM Tealeaf and social media data either directly through Twitter and Facebook, or more often, from curated data services providers such as Gnip and Datasift; these data sources are then joined with the all-powerful (and homegrown) customer profile. Maintaing an up-to-date, complete customer profile on an immutable filesystem like HDFS is not a trival task. Collective needed a system that could combine these numerous data sources, which fit poorly into a relational system, into a unified customer—and that’s where ...