A:

See the Section 9.1, “Overview” in the Architecture chapter.

A:

See the FAQ that is up on the wiki, HBase Wiki FAQ.

A:

Not really. SQL-ish support for HBase via Hive is in development, however Hive is based on MapReduce which is not generally suitable for low-latency requests. See the Chapter 5, Data Model section for examples on the HBase client.

A:

See the link to the BigTable paper in Appendix I, Other Information About HBase in the appendix, as well as the other papers.

A:

See Appendix J, HBase History.

A:

In HBase 0.96, the project moved to a modular structure. Adjust your project's dependencies to rely upon the hbase-client module or another module as appropriate, rather than a single JAR. You can model your Maven depency after one of the following, depending on your targeted version of HBase. See Section 3.5, “Upgrading from 0.94.x to 0.96.x” or Section 3.3, “Upgrading from 0.96.x to 0.98.x” for more information.

<dependency>
	<groupId>org.apache.hbase</groupId>
	<artifactId>hbase-client</artifactId>
	<version>0.98.5-hadoop2</version>
</dependency>                
                

<dependency>
	<groupId>org.apache.hbase</groupId>
	<artifactId>hbase-client</artifactId>
	<version>0.96.2-hadoop2</version>
</dependency>             
                

<dependency>
	<groupId>org.apache.hbase</groupId>
	<artifactId>hbase</artifactId>
	<version>0.94.3</version>
</dependency>            
                

A:

See Section 9.7, “Regions”.

A:

See Section 1.2, “Quick Start - Standalone HBase”.

A:

See Chapter 2, Apache HBase Configuration.

A:

See Chapter 5, Data Model and Chapter 6, HBase and Schema Design

A:

See Section 6.5, “ Supported Datatypes ”.

A:

See Section 6.9, “ Secondary Indexes and Alternate Query Paths ”

A:

This is a very common question. You can't. See Section 6.3.6, “Immutability of Rowkeys”.

A:

See Chapter 5, Data Model, Section 9.3, “Client” and Section 11.1, “Non-Java Languages Talking to the JVM”.

A:

See Chapter 7, HBase and MapReduce

A:

See Chapter 14, Apache HBase Performance Tuning.

A:

See Chapter 15, Troubleshooting and Debugging Apache HBase.

A:

EC2 issues are a special case. See Troubleshooting Section 15.12, “Amazon EC2” and Performance Section 14.12, “Amazon EC2” sections.

A:

See Chapter 17, Apache HBase Operational Management

A:

See Section 17.7, “HBase Backup”

A:

See Appendix I, Other Information About HBase