Introduction to HBase Application Development

HBase

HBase is a column-based distributed storage system that features high reliability, performance, and scalability. HBase is designed to break through limitations of a relational database to process massive amounts of data.

Application scenarios of HBase have the following features:

• Massive data processing (higher than the TB or PB level)
• High throughput
• Highly efficient random read of massive data
• Excellent scalability
• Capable of concurrently processing structured and unstructured data
• Not all Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability (ACID) features supported by traditional relational databases are required.
• HBase tables have the following features:
  • Large: One table contains hundreds of millions of rows and millions of columns.
  • Column-based: Storage and rights control is implemented based on columns (families), and columns (families) are independently retrieved.
  • Sparse: Null columns do not occupy storage space, so a table can be sparse.

API Types

You are advised to use Java to develop HBase applications, because HBase is developed based on Java and Java is concise, universal, and easy-to-understand.

HBase adopts the same Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) as those of Apache HBase. For details about the APIs, visit http://hbase.apache.org/apidocs/index.html.

Table 1 describes the functions that HBase can provide by invoking APIs.