HBase is inspired by the Google big table architecture, and is fundamentally a non-relational, open source, and column-oriented distributed NoSQL. Written in Java, it is designed and developed by many engineers under the framework of Apache Software Foundation. Architecturally it sits on Apache Hadoop and runs by using Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) as its foundation.

It is a column-oriented database, empowered by a fault-tolerant distributed file structure known as HDFS. In addition to this, it also provides very advanced features, such as auto sharding, load-balancing, in-memory caching, replication, compression, near real-time lookups, strong consistency (using multi-version). It uses the latest concepts of block cache and bloom filter to provide faster response to online/real-time request. It supports multiple clients running on heterogeneous platforms by providing user-friendly APIs.

In this chapter, we will discuss how to effectively set up mid and large size HBase cluster on top of Hadoop/HDFS framework.

This chapter will help you set up HBase on a fully distributed cluster. For cluster setup, we will consider REH (RedHat Enterprise-6.2 Linux 64 bit); for our setup we will be using six nodes.