fast querying on hbase...

Question

I am running a little test/poc here.

I need to load a few million rows every day into a database. And it's not log file data, I have comma delimited rows (of columns) which would exactly fit a relational database.

After the loading, I need to allow a very fast search mechanism. Looking a bit at Google's implementation of bigtable and structure around it, I originally thought of using hive integrated with hbase. Hive because of its querying capabilities. The loading works out fine, better than RDBMS perf. However, the querying bottleneck, which was the reason to look for alternatives to RDBMS in the first place, continues with hive too.

Testing hive for querying is not really blazing performance. Perhaps I need to look for alternatives..

Is there something else ? any other tool/solution/library that I can put on top of hbase ? or even without hbase ? (I looked at hbase as an alternative to the RDBMS, moving towards dist computing)

Suggestions please...

Answer 1

The problem you have is that hive runs most of its queries as mapreduce programs which are inherently slow.

If you write your own program to run appropriate scans and then group it yourself, hbase can be very fast. If you want a query language though there are currently no solutions I am aware of.

It's hard to say more than that as your description of the data and the kind of queries you want to run on it is very generic.

Answer 2

Have you looked at a solr or lucene type solution? It is not an SQL solution, but the query language is pretty flexible for some types of uses, and it is extremely fast. There are also ways of distributing it over a cluster of servers for improved performance, scaling either the size of the index, or the number of queries it can handle, or both.