HBase: The Definitive Guide

Preface

You may be reading this book for many reasons. It could be because you heard all about Hadoop and what it can do to crunch petabytes of data in a reasonable amount of time. While reading into Hadoop you found that, for random access to the accumulated data, there is something called HBase. Or it was the hype that is prevalent these days addressing a new kind of data storage architecture. It strives to solve large-scale data problems where traditional solutions may be either too involved or cost-prohibitive. A common term used in this area is NoSQL.

No matter how you have arrived here, I presume you want to know and learn—like I did not too long ago—how you can use HBase in your company or organization to store a virtually endless amount of data. You may have a background in relational database theory or you want to start fresh and this “column-oriented thing” is something that seems to fit your bill. You also heard that HBase can scale without much effort, and that alone is reason enough to look at it since you are building the next web-scale system.

I was at that point in late 2007 when I was facing the task of storing millions of documents in a system that needed to be fault-tolerant and scalable while still being maintainable by just me. I had decent skills in managing a MySQL database system, and was using the database to store data that would ultimately be served to our website users. This database was running on a single server, with another as a backup. The issue was ...