Database Reference
In-Depth Information
You might notice a great deal of similarity between HBase and Accumulo, as both systems
are modeled on Google's BigTable. Accumulo improves on that model with its focus on se-
curity and cell-based access control. Each user has a set of security labels, simple text
strings. Suppose yours were “admin,” “audit,” and “GroupW.” When you want to define the
access to a particular cell, you set the column visibility for that column in a given row to a
Boolean expression of the various labels. In this syntax, the & is logical
AND
and | is logical
OR
. If the cell's visibility rule were admin|audit, then any user with either admin or audit la-
bel could see that cell. If the column visibillity rule were admin&Group7, you would not be
able to see it, as you lack the Group7 label, and both are required.
But Accumulo is more than just security. It also can run at massive scale, with many peta-
bytes of data with hundreds of thousands of ingest and retrieval operations per second.
Tutorial Links
For more information on Accumulo, check out the following resources:
▪ An
introduction
from Aaron Cordova, one of the originators of Accumulo.
▪ A
video tutorial
that focuses on performance and the Accumulo architecture.
▪
This tutorial
is more focused on security and encryption.
▪ The
2014 Accumulo Summit
has a wealth of information.
Example Code
Good example code is a bit long and complex to include here, but can be found on
the
“Examples” section
of the project's home page.
