Introduction to HBase

A talk I gave on HBase at my alma mater. The audience was undergraduate and graduate Computer Science students and I gave a high-level overview of HBase.

1. Introduction to HBase Karthik Kumar
2. Overview • Background • Data Model • APIs • Case Study • Architecture
3. What is HBase? • A “sparse, distributed, consistent, multi-dimensional, sorted map” • Column-oriented • Based on Google’s BigTable (2006) • Apache project
4. Map • At its core, HBase is just a mapping of keys to values key -> value
5. Sorted • Each cell is sorted lexicographically by key ◦ Allows for range queries ▪ (return all values with keys between k1...k5)
6. Multi-dimensional • Key is actually made up of several parts (rowkey, column family, column, version) -> value
7. Sparse • For a given row, we don’t store anything for null/empty values • No data wasted for empty values
8. Distributed • Data stored in HBase can be spread over many machines and can store billions of cells, reliably • Uses HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File System) ◦ Provides protection against node failures
9. Consistent • HBase is strongly consistent ◦ All changes within the same row are atomic ◦ Reads always return the last written & committed value
10. Data Model • Table ◦ Row ▪ Column Family • Column ◦ Cell (value, timestamp) • 1+ columns form a row • 1+ rows form a table • Each column can hold 1+ versions of a value
11. Data Model - Table • Clients store data in HBase tables • Made up of several rows
12. Data Model - Row • Rows provide a logical grouping of cells • Rows are sorted by key
13. Data Model - Columns • Columns are arbitrary labels for attributes of a row • Does not need to be specified up front
14. Data Model - Column Families • Columns are grouped into column families • Used to define storage attributes for columns (compression, # of versions etc).
15. Data Model - Cells • Each cell contains a value and a version (usually a timestamp
16. Putting it all together (Table, RowKey, Family, Column, Timestamp) -> Value
17. Canonical Example: Google WebTable
18. HBase API • HBase Shell: JRuby IRB-based shell ◦ JRuby = Ruby over JVM • REST queries (Stargate): Use curl requests • Thrift: communication protocol used for RPC • MapReduce: Create Mapper and Reducer that queries HBase • Java, JRuby, HBql, Jython, Groovy, Scala: provide libraries that can talk to HBase
19. CRUD Operations • PUT hbase> put ‘table’, ‘rowkey’, ‘fam:col’, ‘value’, ‘ts’ • GET hbase> get ‘table’, ‘rowkey’, {COLUMN => ‘col’, TIMESTAMP => ‘ts’, VERSIONS => 4} • DELETE hbase> delete ‘table’, ‘rowkey’, ‘fam:col’ • SCAN hbase> scan ‘table’, {COLUMNS => ['c1', 'c2'], LIMIT => 10, STARTROW => 'xyz'}
20. HBase Case Study: NFL Play-by-play data • We want to store every play for every game since 2002 • Play by play is time-series data • Use play number instead of timestamp • Identify each game by gameid • One column family with several columns for each attribute of play
21. Sample data gameid,qtr,min,sec,off,def,down,togo,ydline,description,offscore,defscore,season
22. Schema Design
24. HBase Architecture Overview
25. ?