Little did I know, when I was first asked by Packt Publishing whether I would be interested in writing a book about HBase administration on September 2011, how much work and stress (but also a lot of fun) it was going to be.

Now that the book is finally complete, I would like to thank those people without whom it would have been impossible to get done.

First, I would like to thank the HBase developers for giving us such a great piece of software. Thanks to all of the people on the mailing list providing good answers to my many questions, and all the people working on tickets and documents.

I would also like to thank the team at Packt Publishing for contacting me to get started with the writing of this book, and providing support, guidance, and feedback.

Many thanks to Rakuten, my employer, who provided me with the environment to work on HBase and the chance to write this book.

Thank you to Michael Stack for helping me with a quick review of the book.

Thank you to the book's reviewers—Michael Morello, Tatsuya Kawano, Kenichiro Hamano, Shinichi Yamashita, and Masatake Iwasaki.

To Yotaro Kagawa: Thank you for supporting me and my family from the very start and ever since.

To Xinping and Lingyin: Thank you for your support and all your patience—I love you!