Chapter 1. Introducing HBase

 

This chapter covers
  • The origins of Hadoop, HBase, and NoSQL
  • Common use cases for HBase
  • A basic HBase installation
  • Storing and querying data with HBase

 

HBase is a database: the Hadoop database. It’s often described as a sparse, distributed, persistent, multidimensional sorted map, which is indexed by rowkey, column key, and timestamp. You’ll hear people refer to it as a key value store, a column family-oriented database, and sometimes a database storing versioned maps of maps. All these descriptions are correct. But fundamentally, it’s a platform for storing and retrieving data with random access, meaning you can write data as you like and read it back again as you need it. HBase stores structured and semistructured ...

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