Apache

HBase 2.0.0 shipped on April 30, 2018—about 15 months ago as of this writing. HBase 2.0.x is EOL with no further releases. HBase 2.1 is at 2.1.6 and likely will not be maintained much longer. Stable 2.x lines will be 2.2.x and 2.3.x, especially 2.2.x as the version battle-tested at large shops. Work I think deserves focus on HBase 2.x: Procedure V2 and Assignment V2 give distributed workflows atomicity through a framework—a pain point in 1....

After working in the Apache HBase community for a while, I noticed a few relentlessly productive leaders: Michael Stack, contributing day in and day out for a decade, and Duo Zhang, recently promoted to HBase project chair. Stack—a senior engineer I could call “uncle” by age—works across my entire day: morning mail shows a JIRA reply, afternoon another patch, late night comments on someone else’s patch. Duo Zhang—“Duo God” in Lei Jun’s blog—sits to my right....

The third Apache HBaseConAsia summit takes place in Beijing on July 20. As the Apache HBase community’s premier user conference in Asia, HBaseCon has run since 2012. More than 20 experts and community leaders from leading internet and big-data companies will share the latest on HBase and the surrounding ecosystem. Apache HBase is a highly available, high-performance, multi-version distributed NoSQL database on Apache Hadoop—Google Bigtable’s open-source counterpart. It delivers fast random read/write at scale on commodity servers....

Motivation Databases need flexible query patterns. A KV store with only Get, Put, and Scan would frustrate users—real workloads are richer. For orders: “this user’s orders in the last three months” needs at least (1) filter by user and (2) filter by time range, combined with AND. Scanning the whole table on the client and filtering locally would crush the cluster. Server-side filters are required. You also see OR, e.g. orders for Alice or Bob in the last three months—AND vs OR, often mixed....

HBaseConWest2018 was held on June 18 in San Jose, California, hosted by Hortonworks. Attending HBaseCon West in Silicon Valley each year has become routine for the Xiaomi HBase team—our community presence is well known (seven HBase Committers, two PMC members), and the company is willing to share a year-in-review of internal practice and community contributions. In 2018 we submitted the talk “HBase Practice at Xiaomi,” spent considerable effort preparing it, and rehearsed in English three times internally....

On October 20, I accepted an invitation from the Apache HBase community and became an HBase Committer. At Xiaomi I maintain our internal HBase branch and production clusters, and the company already had six HBase Committers—including one PMC member—so becoming a Committer was a natural next step rather than something extraordinary. Compared with someone doing HBase at a company with no Committers, it takes considerably more time and effort. Some observations about the community:...

Notes on HBaseCon West 2017 presentations: 1. HBase at Xiaomi Presented jointly by Zhe Yang and Guanghao Zhang—both became HBase Committers in 2016 (Xiaomi has produced eight HBase Committers in total, including two PMC members, and has resolved hundreds of issues). Highlights included: Lessons from upgrading clusters from 0.94 to 0.98. Experience using G1GC for internal HBase deployments. Community contributions and improvements in 2016, including ordered replication log push, Scan optimizations, async client development, and related benchmark results....