Architecting HBase Applications

Chapter 12. Use Case: Document Store

The final use case focuses on leveraging HBase as a document store. This use case is implemented by a large insurance company, which will henceforth be referred to as “the firm.” The information the firm collects is used to determine accident at faults, payouts, and even individual net worth. This particular use case involves data management and curation at a massive scale.

The firm needed to build a document store that would allow it to serve different documents to numerous business units and customers. A company of this size will end up having hundreds to thousands of different business units and millions of end users. The data from these different business units creates massive amounts of information that needs to be collected, aggregated, curated, and then served to internal and external consumers. The firm needed the ability to serve hundreds of millions of documents over thousands of different logical collections. That is a challenge for any platform, unless that platform is HBase.

Leveraging HBase as a document store is a relatively new use case for HBase. Previously, documents larger than a few 100 KB were not recommended for consumption. The competition to earn the production deployment was against a major RDBMS system. In this bake off, reads, writes, and file sizes were tested. The incumbent vendor performed well against HBase. HBase writes were slightly faster on smaller documents (ranging in size from 4 to 100 KB). Yet, the ...