Announcing KijiSchema for HBase schema management

[Aaron Kimball <ak...@gmail.com>]

HBase fans,

I’m writing to announce the first release of KijiSchema, a new project to
help developers build applications on HBase. You can download it at
www.kiji.org. It is open source and published under the Apache 2 license.

KijiSchema simplifies the development of applications on HBase by providing
developer-friendly Java APIs for storing and managing typed data using Avro.

As an application grows, developers can gracefully evolve the application
schema at the cell level to handle new fields. These features are
particularly well suited for entity-centric data schemas where all
information about a given entity, including dimensional and transaction
data, is encoded within the same row.

Column names and associations of columns with schemas are maintained in a
data dictionary; developers don’t need to rely on reading source code to
remember where data is stored.

Table schemas can be defined in JSON or by using KijiSchema’s declarative
DDL. Developers can also easily run MapReduce over Kiji tables in HBase
using included MR Input- and OutputFormats.

KijiSchema is an open and highly modular system. It runs on top of an
existing HBase 0.92 (CDH4) cluster, and can be run entirely on the client
with no server-side daemons. KijiSchema can also be downloaded as part of a
Kiji BentoBox, which provides a clean install of a mini-cluster of Hadoop,
HBase and Kiji on your laptop in under 15 min. You do not need to have
Hadoop or HBase pre-installed to run the BentoBox.

KijiSchema is inspired by work we have done at WibiData developing
applications for recommendations and personalization on top of HBase. We
will be developing and releasing other components into the Kiji project to
provide additional functionality enabling easy development of data
applications on HBase, including improvements for MapReduce support and
querying tools. We welcome feedback and contributions from the community to
the Kiji Project at www.kiji.org.

Regards,
- Aaron Kimball