HBase in Action

Letter to the HBase Community

Before we examine the current situation, please allow me to flash back a few years and look at the beginnings of HBase.

In 2007, when I was faced with using a large, scalable data store at literally no cost—because the project’s budget would not allow it—only a few choices were available. You could either use one of the free databases, such as MySQL or PostgreSQL, or a pure key/value store like Berkeley DB. Or you could develop something on your own and open up the playing field—which of course only a few of us were bold enough to attempt, at least in those days.

These solutions might have worked, but one of the major concerns was scalability. This feature wasn’t well developed and was often an afterthought to ...