HBase Digest, August 2010

The second “developer release”, hbase-0.89.201007d, is now available for download. To remind everyone, there are currently two active branches of HBase:

• 0.20 – the current stable release series, being maintained with patches for bug fixes only.
• 0.89 – a development release series with active feature and stability development, not currently recommended for production use.

First one doesn’t support HDFS durability (edits may be lost in the case of node failure) whereas the second one does. You can find more information at this wiki page.  HBase 0.90 release may happen in October!  See info from developers.

Community trends & news:

• New HBase AMIs are available for dev release and 0.20.6.
• Looking for some GUI that could be used for browsing through tables in HBase? Check out Toad for Cloud, watch for HBase-Explorer and HBase-GUI-Admin.
• How many regions a RegionServer can support and what are the consequences of having lots of regions in a RegionServer? Check info in this thread.
• Some more complaints to be aware of regarding HBase performing on EC2 in this thread. For those who missed it, more on Hadoop & HBase reliability with regard to EC2 in our March digest post.
• Need guidance in sizing your first Hadoop/HBase cluster? This article will be helpful.

FAQ:

• Where can I find information about data model design with regard to HBase?
  Take a look at https://wiki.apache.org/hadoop/HBase/HBasePresentations.
• How can I perform SQL-like query “SELECT … FROM …” on HBase?
  First, consider that HBase is a key-value store which should be treated accordingly. But if you are still up for writing ad-hoc queries in your particular situation take a look at Hive & HBase integration.
• How can I access Hadoop & HBase metrics?
  Refer to HBase Metrics documentation.
• How to connect to HBase from java app running on remote (to cluster) machine?
  Check out client package documentation. Alternatively, one can use the REST interface: Stargate.