WhyNosql

Key HBase community members advise people not to host their HBase cluster on EC2. And they have good reasons for advising so. But in this post I am going to explain why we decided to host our HBase cluster on EC2 and why we continue to host it on EC2. When we began experimenting with [...]

Recently we learned few interesting lessons about architecting HBase on EC2. Since the lessons we learned are more related to EC2 than HBase, I decided to post it on my Amazon Web Services related blog. For those who are planning to host their HBase/Hadoop systems on EC2, it’s a must read – http://aws-musings.com/hbase-on-ec2-using-ebs-volumes-lessons-learned/

Distributed counters is an important functionality many distributed databases offer. For an ad network distributed counters are important for many reasons. Real time ad impressions and click data can be used for ad optimization. HBase and Cassandra both support distributed counters. Ultimately, whatever system you may choose, scaling distributed counters remains a challenge. It boils [...]

Each HBase region server hosts many regions – possibly hundreds or even thousands. How do you find out which one of them is a hotspot? We saw that CPU on one of the region server was shooting up at peak traffic. But the region server had 4 tables (and hundreds of regions) and their access [...]

There are two useful tutorials (HBase wiki and Yaan’s blog) on the web devoted to this topic. But I think both of them missed few steps. In spite of following the tutorials, I found myself struggling with compiling thrift and python’s No module found errors. Hence this attempt.

How do we accomplish real time reports in a big data system? What if you want to count ad impressions and give real time reports to your customers? HBase makes it really easy to accomplish Aggregation. I am going to tell you how we accomplished aggregation with HBase. The HTable class in HBase client API [...]