Using HBase effectively - What You Need to Know as an Application Developer

HBase is one of the new NoSQL data stores that have come up in the recent years and has been gaining popularity at a fast pace. It is a true open source implementation of the Google Bigtable, and is a part of the Hadoop ecosystem. HBase is known to scale to 100s of nodes easily, providing fast random access to terabytes and petabytes of data. This tutorial is to get you started in the world of HBase so you can build a scalable application of your own.

We’ll accomplish this by covering the following aspects:

1. The background of HBase as a datastore
2. Setting up HBase on a *nix machine (bring your laptop with Linux on it. Macs work just as well and so does a remote EC2 instance)
3. Build a real world application from ground up, thinking about scale from the get go. The application will use HBase as it’s backend store.
4. HBase data model and schema design basics
5. Overview of HBase internals and design and what that means for your application

We’ll also touch upon the following topics:

1. Production deployment strategies and things to think about
2. Tuning HBase for different workloads and performance testing your system

At the end of the tutorial, you’ll have a good understanding of how to effectively use HBase as the backend store for your application.