HBase: The Definitive Guide

Chapter 1. Introduction

Before we start looking into all the moving parts of HBase, let us pause to think about why there was a need to come up with yet another storage architecture. Relational database management systems (RDBMSes) have been around since the early 1970s, and have helped countless companies and organizations to implement their solution to given problems. And they are equally helpful today. There are many use cases for which the relational model makes perfect sense. Yet there also seem to be specific problems that do not fit this model very well.^[5]

The Dawn of Big Data

We live in an era in which we are all connected over the Internet and expect to find results instantaneously, whether the question concerns the best turkey recipe or what to buy mom for her birthday. We also expect the results to be useful and tailored to our needs.

Because of this, companies have become focused on delivering more targeted information, such as recommendations or online ads, and their ability to do so directly influences their success as a business. Systems like Hadoop^[6] now enable them to gather and process petabytes of data, and the need to collect even more data continues to increase with, for example, the development of new machine learning algorithms.

Where previously companies had the liberty to ignore certain data sources because there was no cost-effective way to store all that information, they now are likely to lose out to the competition. There is an increasing need to store ...