Google's [WWW] Bigtable, a distributed storage system for
structured data, is a very effective mechanism for storing very
large amounts of data in a distributed environment. Just as
Bigtable leverages the distributed data storage provided by the
[WWW] Google File System, Hbase will provide Bigtable-like
capabilities on top of Hadoop. Data is organized into tables,
rows and columns, but a query language like SQL is not
supported. Instead, an Iterator-like interface is available for
scanning through a row range (and of course there is an ability
to retrieve a column value for a specific key). Any particular
column may have multiple values for the same row key. A
secondary key can be provided to select a particular value or an
Iterator can be set up to scan through the key-value pairs for
that column given a specific row key. From the
Hbase/HbaseArchitecture page: HBase uses a data model very
similar to that of Bigtable. Users store data rows in labelled
tables. A data row has a sortable key and an arbitrary num