Seven Databases in Seven Weeks, 2nd Edition

Day 1: CRUD and Table Administration

Today’s goal is to learn the nuts and bolts of working with HBase. You’ll get a local instance of HBase running in standalone mode (rather than in distributed mode), and then you’ll use the HBase shell to create and alter tables and to insert and modify data using basic CRUD-style commands. After that, you’ll explore how to perform some of those operations programmatically by using the HBase Java API in JRuby. Along the way, you’ll uncover some HBase architectural concepts, such as the relationship between rows, column families, columns, and values in a table. Just bear in mind that these concepts in HBase are subtly different from their counterparts in relational databases.

According to most HBase admins ...