Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Summary
In this chapter, I convinced you that you will be able to build your own HBase
clusters, and then spent a large part of the chapter walking you through this process.
Please follow the steps precisely! Many hints that are found here are very important,
and without them, the cluster will not work.
Once you are at ease with the basic construction, you will be able to strike on your
own, change the ways in which you build those clusters, and eventually come up
with something new and unexpected.
Please keep in mind that we used the Cloudera Hadoop distribution as a basis
for all the instructions. You are not limited to this; you have a choice. The
Apache
BigTop
project is your independent alternative (
http://bigtop.apache.org/
).
HortonWorks
and
MapR
also offer distributions with their managers. All of them
provide the same excellent Hadoop distribution. In this topic, I wanted to give you
a clear set of instructions that worked for me.
For the comparison of different Hadoop distributions, please refer to
Chapter 11
,
Distributions,
of our open source topic
Hadoop Illuminated
(
http://
hadoopilluminated.com/hadoop_illuminated/Distributions.html
). If you are
interested in the precise installation instructions for other distributions, watch out for
our Hadoop illuminated labs at
https://github.com/hadoop-illuminated/HI-
labs
. Eventually, all the distributions will be described there, in the admin labs.
Note that there are exactly 33 pictures in this chapter. This, of course,
is no coincidence.
Recall the poem by Omar Khayyám, which tells you that there are no coincidences
in this world:
"The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it."
One can argue whether tears can or cannot erase our mistakes, but in this world of
clusters, we can always try by repeating the steps again and again.
In the next chapter, we will discuss using Java code to read from and write to
HBase. We will also see how we can control HBase with the help of the HBase shell.
The most important thing we will learn is to operate through SQL statements, in a
manner familiar to all SQL database users.
