Database Reference
In-Depth Information
HBase can be deined as a sparse, distributed, persistent, multidimensional
sorted map, which is indexed by a row key, column key, and timestamp. HBase
is designed to run on a cluster of commodity hardware and stores both structured
and semi-structured data. HBase has the ability to scale horizontally as you add
more machines to the cluster.
Use cases of HBase
There are a number of use cases where HBase can be a storage system. This section
discusses a few of the popular use cases for HBase and the well-known companies
that have adopted HBase. Let's discuss the use cases irst:
•
Handling content
: In today's world, a variety of content is available for the
users for consumption. Also, the variety of application clients, such as browser,
mobile, and so on, leads to an additional requirement where each client needs
the same content in different formats. Users not only consume content but also
generate a variety of content in a large volume with a high velocity, such as
tweets, Facebook posts, images, bloging, and many more. HBase is the perfect
choice as the backend of such applications, for example, many scalable content
management solutions are using HBase as their backend.
•
Handling incremental data
: In many use cases, trickled data is added to a
data store for further usage, such as analytics, processing, and serving. This
trickled data could be coming from an advertisement's impressions such as
clickstreams and user interaction data or it can be time series data. HBase is
used for storage in all such cases. For example,
Open Time Series Database
(
OpenTSDB
) uses HBase for data storage and metrics generation. The
counters feature (discussed in
Chapter 5
,
The HBase Advanced API
) is used
by Facebook for counting and storing the "likes" for a particular page/
image/post.
Some of the companies that are using HBase in their respective use cases are
as follows:
•
Facebook
(
www.facebook.com
): Facebook is using HBase to power its
message infrastructure. Facebook opted for HBase to scale from their old
messages infrastructure which handled over 350 million users, sending
over 15 billion person-to-person messages per month. HBase was selected
due to the excellent scalability and performance for big workloads, along
with autoload balancing and failover features and so on. Facebook also uses
HBase for counting and storing the "likes" contributed by users.
