[Hadoop Wiki] Update of "Hbase/FAQ_Design" by DougMeil

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The "Hbase/FAQ_Design" page has been changed by DougMeil:
http://wiki.apache.org/hadoop/Hbase/FAQ_Design

New page:
Describe Hbase/FAQ_Design here.


== Questions ==
 1. [[#1|Can I change the regionserver behavior so it, for example, orders keys other than lexicographically, etc.?]]
 1. [[#2|Are there any schema design examples?]]
 1. [[#3|What is the maximum recommended cell size?]]
 1. [[#4|Why can't I iterate through the rows of a table in reverse order?]]

== Answers ==


'''1. <<Anchor(1)>> Can I change the regionserver behavior so it, for example, orders keys other than lexicographically, etc.?'''
  No.  See [[https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HBASE-605|HBASE-605]]

'''2. <<Anchor(2)>> Are there any Schema Design examples?'''

See [[http://www.slideshare.net/hmisty/20090713-hbase-schema-design-case-studies|HBase Schema Design -- Case Studies]] by Evan(Qingyan) Liu or the following text taken from Jonathan Gray's mailing list posts.

- There's a very big difference between storage of relational/row-oriented databases and column-oriented databases. For example, if I have a table of 'users' and I need to store friendships between these users... In a relational database my design is something like:

Table: users(pkey = userid) Table: friendships(userid,friendid,...) which contains one (or maybe two depending on how it's impelemented) row for each friendship.

In order to lookup a given users friend, SELECT * FROM friendships WHERE userid = 'myid';

The cost of this relational query continues to increase as a user adds more friends. You also begin to have practical limits. If I have millions of users, each with many thousands of potential friends, the size of these indexes grow exponentially and things get nasty quickly. Rather than friendships, imagine I'm storing activity logs of actions taken by users.

In a column-oriented database these things scale continuously with minimal difference between 10 users and 10,000,000 users, 10 friendships and 10,000 friendships.

Rather than a friendships table, you could just have a friendships column family in the users table. Each column in that family would contain the ID of a friend. The value could store anything else you would have stored in the friendships table in the relational model. As column families are stored together/sequentially on a per-row basis, reading a user with 1 friend versus a user with 10,000 friends is virtually the same. The biggest difference is just in the shipping of this information across the network which is unavoidable. In this system a user could have 10,000,000 friends. In a relational database the size of the friendship table would grow massively and the indexes would be out of control.

'''Q: Can you please provide an example of "good de-normalization" in HBase and how its held consistent (in your friends example in a relational db, there would be a cascadingDelete)? As I think of the users table: if I delete an user with the userid='123', do I have to walk through all of the other users column-family "friends" to guaranty consistency?! Is de-normalization in HBase only used to avoid joins? Our webapp doesn't use joins at the moment anyway.'''

You lose any concept of foreign keys. You have a primary key, that's it. No
secondary keys/indexes, no foreign keys.

It's the responsibility of your application to handle something like deleting a friend and cascading to the friendships. Again, typical small web apps are far simpler to write using SQL, you become responsible for some of the things that were once handled for you.

Another example of "good denormalization" would be something like storing a users "favorite pages". If we want to query this data in two ways: for a given user, all of his favorites. Or, for a given favorite, all of the users who have it as a favorite. Relational database would probably have tables for users, favorites, and userfavorites. Each link would be stored in one row in the userfavorites table. We would have indexes on both 'userid' and 'favoriteid' and could thus query it in both ways described above. In HBase we'd probably put a column in both the users table and the favorites table, there would be no link table.

That would be a very efficient query in both architectures, with relational performing better much better with small datasets but less so with a large dataset.

Now asking for the favorites of these 10 users. That starts to get tricky in HBase and will undoubtedly suffer worse from random reading. The flexibility of SQL allows us to just ask the database for the answer to that question. In a
small dataset it will come up with a decent solution, and return the results to you in a matter of milliseconds. Now let's make that userfavorites table a few billion rows, and the number of users you're asking for a couple thousand. The query planner will come up with something but things will fall down and it will end up taking forever. The worst problem will be in the index bloat. Insertions to this link table will start to take a very long time. HBase will perform virtually the same as it did on the small table, if not better because of superior region distribution.

'''Q:[Michael Dagaev] How would you design an Hbase table for many-to-many association between two entities, for example Student and Course?'''

I would define two tables:

Student: student id student data (name, address, ...) courses (use course ids as column qualifiers here)
Course: course id course data (name, syllabus, ...) students (use student ids as column qualifiers here)

Does it make sense? 

A[Jonathan Gray] : 
Your design does make sense.

As you said, you'd probably have two column-families in each of the Student and Course tables. One for the data, another with a column per student or course.
For example, a student row might look like:
Student :
id/row/key = 1001 
data:name = Student Name 
data:address = 123 ABC St 
courses:2001 = (If you need more information about this association, for example, if they are on the waiting list) 
courses:2002 = ...

This schema gives you fast access to the queries, show all classes for a student (student table, courses family), or all students for a class (courses table, students family). 

'''3. <<Anchor(3)>> What is the maximum recommended cell size?'''

A rough rule of thumb, with little empirical validation, is to keep the data in HDFS and store pointers to the data in HBase if you expect the cell size to be consistently above 10 MB. If you do expect large cell values and you still plan to use HBase for the storage of cell contents, you'll want to increase the block size and the maximum region size for the table to keep the index size reasonable and the split frequency acceptable.

'''4. <<Anchor(4)>> Why can't I iterate through the rows of a table in reverse order?'''

Because of the way [[http://hbase.apache.org/docs/current/api/org/apache/hadoop/hbase/io/hfile/HFile.html|HFile]] works: for efficiency, column values are put on disk with the length of the value written first and then the bytes of the actual value written second. To navigate through these values in reverse order, these length values would need to be stored twice (at the end as well) or in a side file. A robust secondary index implementation is the likely solution here to ensure the primary use case remains fast.