Tuesday, July 12, 2011

Hbase paper from SIGMOD 11

Real-time HBase usage at Facebook presented at SIGMOD '11.

Good to see the thinking behind selecting a technology instead of just a feature list.

Interesting points:
Strong consistency (within a data center) - "While a globally distributed strongly consistent system is practically impossible, a system that could at least provide strong consistency within a data center would make it possible to provide a good user experience".  

High Availability - FB addresses the problem of namenode failure by implementing the AvatarNode.

Atomic read-modify-write primitives - Interesting to me because many social apps tend to require highly concurrent read-modify-write operations (think hundreds of thousands of people commenting on a single thread).




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