On Thu, Aug 26, 2010 at 11:59 AM, Gagandeep Singh < [email protected]> wrote:
> From past one month I have been evaluating Hypertable and HBase. I would > like to share my findings. Though I am not including much details here here > but I will soon share it with the community. > > I found following shortcomings in HBase > 1. Slower or equal in performance when compared with Hypertable. All my > tests were ran over a DB schema where I interact with multiple tables with > multiple column families and with multiple columns. > 2. HBase Shell syntax is really difficult to adapt for someone coming from > SQL background. Unfortunately most of the users will come from SQL > background. Here I recall the success story of firefox Mozilla. They became > a success because they have not changed the menu options in the browser and > kept it as close to IE because they knew from where they were going to get > their users. > > Best things about HBase > 1. Stable, I never got a crash when performing any operation even under > very > High load tests whereas Hypertable is unstable. Even their new releases are > not up to the mark. I can understand that both communities are open source > and evolving so such things can happen. > 2. Much easier and better documented API's. > 3. UI interface to see logs and many other important information. > 4. Support for Gangila which makes life easy for people like us who needs > to > monitor DB and Machine performances. > > I would like to go for HBase because of its stability but since Hypertable > has shown better performance our client prefers it. I do not have anything > against Hypertable. But I think HBase will def. catch up with performance > issues sooner than later. > > Would you also like to share any other comparison points which can help me > put my case strongly in support of HBase ? > HBase's community overlaps much more closely with Hadoop's, and also has better integration with MR, etc. Being Java, we can iterate much faster on features (though admittedly we do take a bit of a performance hit). We can also integrate more easily with a larger number of libraries (eg lucene, solr integration being worked on by the community currently). The HBase development team is also much larger and more active. License-wise, HBase is Apache 2.0 licensed whereas Hypertable is GPL - this makes it a lot easier to embed in products without fear of viral license contamination. Lastly, there are a lot more examples of production deployments of HBase than Hypertable, and even more currently in PoC/development phase which I can't talk about publicly. -Todd -- Todd Lipcon Software Engineer, Cloudera
