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HBase Digest, March 2010

We were waiting until the end of the month hoping to include coverage of the new HBase 0.20.4 version, but HBase developers are still working on it. This release will contain a lot of critical fixes and enhancements, so stay tuned.

Typically, our HBase Digest posts consist of three main parts: project status and summary of mailing lists’ most interesting discussions, other projects’ efforts & announcements related to HBase technology, and a FAQ section that aims to save time of the very responsive HBase developers answering the same questions again and again. Please feel free to provide feedback on how you like this coverage format in the post comments.

  • A must-read HBase & HDFS presentation from Todd Lipcon of Cloudera that was a part of “HUG9: March HBase User Group at Mozilla”. Links to other presentations are here. The meeting was followed by a nice discussion on Hadoop (and therefore HBase) reliability with regard to EC2. People shared a lot of useful information about hosting opportunities for one’s HBase setup.
  • Very interesting discussion covers various use-cases of what HBase is a good fit for.
  • Some notes on what settings to adjust when running HBase on a machine with low RAM in this thread.
  • Good questions from HBase evaluating person/team and good answers in this thread. Such discussions periodically appear on mailing lists and given the great responsiveness of HBase committers are very good to read by those who thinking about using HBase or are already using, like we are.
  • The warning we already shared with readers through our Hadoop Digest (March): avoid upgrading your clusters to Sun JVM 1.6.0u18, stick to 1.6.0u16 for a while — this update proved to be very stable.
  • One more explanation of the difference of indexed (IHBase) and transactional (THBase) indices.
  • Deleting the row and putting another one with the same key at the same time (i.e. performing “clean update”) can cause unexpected results if not done properly. There are several solutions to make this process safer currently. In case you face this problem, please share your experience with HBase developers on user mailing list, they will be happy to consider your case when developing solution to the issue in next release.
  • Making column names/keys shorter can result in ~20-30% of RAM savings, and visible storage savings too. Even bigger advantage came with defining the right schema and column families. More advices in this thread.
  • What are the options for connecting to HBase running on EC2 from outside the Amazon cloud using Java library? Thread…

Most notable efforts:

  • Lucehbase: Lucene Index on HBase, ported from Lucandra. Please find more info on this topic in the comments to our super popular Lucandra: A Cassandra-based Lucene backend post.
  • Elephant Bird: Twitter’s library of LZO and/or Protocol Buffer-related Hadoop InputFormats, OutputFormats, Writables, Pig LoadFuncs, HBase miscellanea, etc. The majority of these are in production at Twitter running over rather big data every day.

Small FAQ:

  1. How to back up HBase data?
    You can either do exports at the HBase API level (a la Export class), or you can force flush all your tables and do an HDFS level copy of the /hbase directory (using distcp for example).
  2. Is there a way to perform multiple get (put, delete)?
    There is a work being done on that, please refer to HBASE-1845. The patch is available for 0.20.3 version.

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