The HBase Basics

[Charles Mason <ch...@gmail.com>]

Hi All,

Forgive me if a few of the answers to the below questions seem obvious
but I just want to clarify my understanding about HBase.

Firstly in an ideal environment where you deploy Habase on an HDFS
cluster do you have two separate clusters one for the HDFS nodes and
one for the Hbase Nodes or in reality does each cluster node run the
HDFS software as well as HBase, are there any benefits to doing that.

Secondly, if you access HBase through the Thrift api how does its
server relate to the Hbase cluster. Say you have a web server which
uses the Thrift api where do you ideally run the Thrift servlet on the
same machine or somewhere inside the HBase cluster. What protocol does
the Thrift Server use to talk to the HBase cluster?

Thirdly just to be clear, HBase doesn't support secondary indexes. So
say you had a user table with the userID as the row index and
containing the usual user data and you need to allow password resets
based on the users email. You would have a second table with the users
email address as the key and a column containing the matching user ID
so you could quickly get access to the main user table via the users
email address. Then its up to the application to keep the two tables
in sync.

Thanks in advance.

Charlie M