HBase Futures @Hortonworks

As we have said here, Hortonworks has been steadily increasing our investment in HBase. HBase’s adoption has been increasing in the enterprise. To continue this trend, we feel HBase needs investments in the areas of:

1. Reliability and High Availability (all data always available, and recovery from failures is quick)
2. Autonomous operation (minimum operator intervention)
3. Wire compatibility (to support rolling upgrades across a couple of versions at least)
4. Cross data-center replication (for disaster recovery)
5. Snapshots and backups (be able to take periodic snapshots of certain/all tables and be able to restore them at a later point if required)
6. Monitoring and Diagnostics (which regionserver is hot or what caused an outage)

Significant work has happened in each of the areas outlined above in the 0.94 and 0.96 (currently trunk) branches. For example, the MTTR (mean time to recover) work happening in HBASE-5843 will improve the data availability significantly. HBASE-5305 addresses wire compatibility. HBASE-6055 is the work underway on Snapshots. We believe by solving the above problems, HBase will gain a much wider adoption in the enterprise, and will be considered a very viable option for the use cases it supports.

Doing the above would open HBase to many of the enterprise users, and going forward, we envisage the need for:

1. Better and improved clients (asynchronous clients, and, in multiple languages)
2. Cell-level security (access control for every cell in a table)
3. Multi-tenancy (HBase becomes a viable shared platform for multiple applications using it)
4. Secondary indexing functionality

The above are some of the areas that Hortonworks is investing in as well. Stay tuned for further updates on these topics.

Ref: http://hortonworks.com/blog/hbase-futures/