Seven Databases in Seven Weeks, 2nd Edition

Chapter 3HBase

Apache HBase is made for big jobs, like a nail gun. You would never use HBase to catalog your corporate sales list or build a to-do list app for fun, just like you’d never use a nail gun to build a doll house. If the size of your dataset isn’t many, many gigabytes at the very least then you should probably use a less heavy-duty tool.

At first glance, HBase looks a lot like a relational database, so much so that if you didn’t know any better, you might think that it is one. In fact, the most challenging part of learning HBase isn’t the technology; it’s that many of the words used in HBase are deceptively familiar. For example, HBase stores data in buckets it calls tables, which contain cells that appear at the intersection of ...